(Holdwater note: The source from where this was taken had a  good number of scanning errors, many of which I managed to correct... but some remain.)


This evening I am going to consider something that I have noticed for many years. That is the basic assumption in Europe and America that the Turks must be in the wrong, whether the question is human rights, activities in Cyprus, the Armenian Question, Turkish-Greek relations, or almost any other contentious subject. Often it is assumed that the Turks are evil. If there is a question of comparative guilt, it is assumed that the Turks were most guilty. Turks have to prove themselves three times for every one assertion provided by their opponents.

All of this may surprise those of you who have known Turks well and have found that Turks are human beings like anyone else. But the unfairness with which Turks are treated does not surprise those of us who have looked into the background of the views and prejudices people have of the Turks.

I will not be speaking only of British propaganda tonight, but of the effects of what the British propaganda machine produced in World War I. That means I will also be discussing America, where that propaganda had its greatest effect.

The reasons for the ill feeling against Turks that is often seen in Western countries, as all of you know, go back to the Middle Ages. They go back to the period in which the name Muhammad was virtually synonymous with the Devil in Western culture. Europeans and Americans had a long memory of conflict between Christianity and Islam, and Turks were the political leaders of Islam.

The particular image of the Turk as the enemy developed in the nineteenth century along what can be described as racialist lines. In the United States, as well as in Britain, books were printed which portrayed the Turks as members of groups of people who were described almost uniformly as vicious. ``Brutal" was the primary adjective that was used to describe them. In America, and I suspect in Britain as well, we feared something called the "Yellow Peril." The Yellow Peril supposedly was a great danger to the "white race" (a fine example of psychological transference, since at the time Europeans were much more likely to assault Asiatics than vice versa). The Turks were portrayed as being at the forefront of the yellow peril, the leaders of the Yellow Peril. Those who had never seen a Turk found this an easy mental exercise: Turks lived in Asia. Turks were great warriors. Therefore, Turks led the Yellow Peril.

Traditional racialist and religious animosity against Turks has left a legacy of prejudice that has affected European and American feelings about Turks in our own day. But Westerners have long held religious and racial prejudices about many peoples. None of these prejudices seems to rise to the level of the feelings against the Turks. No other group is assumed to be so violent and brutal, nor is any other group so often and routinely assumed to be wrong in all its disputations with other peoples. There is more to the feelings against Turks than traditional animosities.

From my experience in many years of teaching American students and in many years of dealing with the American public, I believe the Armenian Question has been the primary agency through which against the Turks has been advanced. The conflict between Turks and Armenians during , to World War I has had a permanent affect on the beliefs and prejudices of Americans and arts. In America today, if you ask someone, "What do you know about Turks?" you will very find that the only thing they think they know about Turks is summarized in one statement: killed all those Armenians, didn't they?" That is it, the sum of knowledge on the Turks.

Today in America, the alleged genocide of the Armenians is included in the books that teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren. Through political influence and writers' ignorance, it has been included as ;another example of inhumanity, a false example. Through the agency of Holocaust Studies, American children are learning what is usually the only thing they ever learn about Turks, and that is the so-called Armenian Genocide. Most American school children see nothing else about Turks in their schoolbooks. They only see Turks in their study of what Turks supposedly did to Armenians. And. I might say, it is a completely one-sided description at that. The feeling about Turks is so ingrained that it is impossible to have rational dialogue on the subject. But the question remains — where does all this come from? Why do the otherwise caring and liberal academics who write on the Holocaust feel it proper to vilify one people, the Turks, without considering any other side of a contested issue? In studying the prejudices against Turks, I have found two basic causes for the ingrained anti-Turkish feeling in western society, and especially in America. The one is the work of American missionaries and the other is British propaganda during and immediately after World War One. This evening, as the title of my talk indicates, I am going to speak on the British and about British propaganda. 

During World War I there were many reasons for propaganda, but the most common was simply the desire to make your enemy look bad. Any propaganda organization intends to downplay the good side and emphasize the bad side of its enemies. The most well known example of this is the anti-German propaganda of World War I — the babies on bayonets, the starving Belgians , the rape of nuns. The intention of this propaganda was to draw neutrals to the side of Britain, the primary neutral of course being the United States. But propaganda is also useful as a morale builder for one's own side. It can make people feel they are fighting a holy crusade against evil. In some cases, especially in the second world war, this was true There was a definite evil to be opposed. In the first war it was much harder to identify one side as more evil than the other, and thus propaganda was all the more needed. In addition to the general desire to defame one's enemies, there were very specific reasons British propaganda would come out against the Turks. One of them was the traditional British opinion of the Turks, at least among those who thought of the Turks at all. Those Britons had a very ambivalent feeling towards Turks. This had been true for some time. The best example of this is probably the period of the 1876 Bulgarian Rebellion, when Disraeli's and Gladstone's visions of the Turks alternated in the public mind. At first, the public image was negative; the Turks were blamed for the "Bulgarian Horrors." But soon after the British changed their minds and the public cried out for war with Russia to defend the Ottoman Empire (and British self-interest). From that time until World War I, a number of travelers, diplomats, and others wrote kindly of the Turks, balancing the writings of those, especially British missionaries and other clergymen, whose opinions were not so favorable. A feeling developed that the Turks, while bad in some ways, still had many good qualities. They weren't Christians, but they were honest and could be relied upon. The word of a Turk was good. The feeling about Turks in Britain was not necessarily bad at the beginning of World War One. This is especially true once Turks started actually fighting the British. Favorable reports of Turks came back to Britain, even appearing in some newspapers that were allied with the government. These reports described the Turks as men of honor. It seems to me, looking back without any good scientific evidence, that the British officer corps and the Turkish officer corps had very much in common; honor was a very important thing to both of them and they both could rely on the word and the actions of the other. 

This was not the kind of thing that the British government wanted its people to believe about one of their arch enemies. It is very difficult to fight a war against people if you feel you must say good things about them. Something had to be done to change this image.

Another intent of British propaganda was to counter the image of Russia, especially in the United States. Britain wanted the United States to take its side in the war, or at least to remain a friendly neutral. In the United States, Russia had a very bad image, a well-deserved bad image, because it had been involved in the persecution of the Jews for some time, specifically in 1915. Then Russian soldiers had massacred large numbers of Jews during Russian campaigns against the Germans. Because of that and because reports of these atrocities reports had come back to the United States, Russia, one of Britain's allies, had become a very negative factor in trying to draw America into the war. It was feared that the Jewish influence in America was so great that the Russian actions would harm Britain. This was ridiculous. However, throughout World War I, from the very beginning days of the war through the Balfour Declaration and beyond, there was a great belief, a prejudiced belief, in something called "The Jews" and the "Power of the Jews." As we know, in the war the German Jews fought on the side of Germany and the English Jews fought on the side of England. But the feeling that there was some great and powerful international organization of Jews was strong even in the British government. People took action based on their belief in it. The British feared that the Jews were powerful in America and would favor the Central Powers.

Also, and again this is something that is hard for us to believe today, there was a great fear about India. There was fear at the time that Indian Muslims would engage in a Jihad, a holy war, against the Allies, alongside their brother Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. There was never really a chance this would happen. With hindsight, we can see that, but at the time the British Government feared a Muslim revolt. If you could make the Turks Iook evil, then you could teach the Indian Muslims that the Muslim Turks were really bad Muslims, not the sort of people who should be followed into war or anywhere else.

Looking back today, such things may seem hard to believe. I can only assurre you that they definitely were believed at the time.

To the British, the most important of all things was to hrrr (have?) Americans against the Central Powers. Eventually, as you know, Britain was to successfully draw America into the war. Those who have looked over the archival record know that the Wilson administration was in favor of the British and other Allied Powers long before America entered the war. They needed justifications to allow them to enter the war, to convince the American people that the Central Powers should be opposed. The Turks were a ready target, because propaganda against them was already available. One force available to the propagandists was the American Missionary. Propagandists could play upon the great respect Americans held for the missionaries who had gone to the Ottoman Empire, and who often appeared in the newspapers as national heroes for a Christian Nation. The American feeling of affection and respect for the missionaries could be mobilized as a force to oppose the natural anti-Allied feeling among many Americans, a feeling especially prominent among the Germans and the Irish. If the Turks could be portrayed as the persecutors of missionaries and murderers of Christians, the taint would also pass to the Germans. Portraying the Germans as the sort of people who would deal with those evil Turks, and indeed lead those evil Turks into battle, would show the American public how bad those Germans were. Indeed, this policy was to be greatly successful in affecting American public opinion. 

The British agency entrusted with changing public opinion was at first called the War Propaganda Bureau. It was a part of the Foreign Office. In 1914 it was stationed in Wellington House. (I am sure someone here knows where Wellington House is or was, but I have never seen the place.) The Director was the Right Honorable C. F. Masterman. In December of 1916 it was made into the Department of Information under Colonel John Buchan, with Masterman as his deputy. Later, in 1918, a Ministry of Information was created, under Lord Beaverbrook.. However, to the people who were involved in British propaganda the propaganda office always was the same. It was simply called Wellington House.

The policy committee that operated Wellington House had some first class minds. In fact the committee was very heavy with historians. (You can tell a society has a very high level of culture if they recognize the worth of historians.) The committee included people such as Gooch and Toynbee, the latter of whom we will be saying much.

The Wellington House brief was simple, the same brief as that of all propagandists. They were to make the enemies look as bad as possible and make their friends, and especially the British themselves, look as good as could be. Their main focus was, naturally, Germany, but much effort was expended against the Turks. Propaganda was not considered to be a gentleman's game. Toynbee himself remarked that he would like to get out of it for that reason. Nevertheless it was something that had to be done and British gentlemen did it. They were probably always ashamed of their work, however, as indicated by the fact that they destroyed all the records of the Propaganda Office immediately after the war.

The only Propaganda Office records that exist have often been found by chance. Some few were found when the British again took up propaganda during World War II and found they did not know what to do. They said, "You know, we obviously had a propaganda ministry. They did good work, very good work actually. How did they do it?" They searched for documents from the first war and in total found four letters, all the records that had been kept, and these were hidden away. Over the years other documents have gradually emerged. I actually have found a number of them myself as I have gone through Foreign Office documents. They were records that had been sent off to other offices. Although the originals were destroyed, some copies were kept in relevant Foreign Office departments, especially in the Foreign Office records for the United States. So we have a modest number of documents. They indicate some small part of what Wellington House did.

 

Another favorite of mine is "The Clean-fighting Turk, a Spurious Claim." Mark Sykes, as many of you know, was a great traveller and a very intelligent man. He was one of the two people that negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement that was to lead to the dividing up of the Middle East by the British and French after the war. But this story should began with Lloyd George, who did not like Turks very much and who, of course, was Prime Minister. Lloyd George was very interested in defaming the Turks and was personally interested in the propaganda bureau. He instructed that certain topics be developed by the bureau: "[The Turk's] incapacity for good Government; his misrule, and above all, his massacres of all the industrious population." An order from the Prime Minister. He added that the propaganda should be surreptitious: "I need hardly point out that it is very important that all this should be done gradually and that the articles should be spread over a considerable period of time, so as not to make it too obvious what we are driving at. Sir Mark Sykes' article in the Times,' the 'Clean-Fighting Turk,' is just what we want."

The Sykes article can be considered the template for what was produced for the press. Unfortunately, we may never know what all those articles were. If you go through the American and the British press you can read articles and say to yourself, "That must be Wellington House work," but you cannot prove it.

This one we know. The Foreign Office saw a problem, the problem mentioned before — the Turks looked too good to many people in Britain. They were especially bothered by the image of what was called the "Clean Fighting Turk", the image drawn from the fact that the Turks did a good job as soldiers and could be relied as men of honor. Now we will not discuss the accuracy of that claim here. The important point is that it was believed. And so something had to be done about it. Someone had to negate this image, write against it. And so their Foreign Office masters directed Wellington House to do something about the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. The writing of the original message was somewhat mistaken. Wellington House received an order that said they were to propagandize and bring out the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. Wellington House wrote back and said, "Why in the world would you want us to prove that the Turks are clean fighting?" The matter was finally cleared up.

Wellington House went to Mark Sykes and asked him to write an article attacking the good image of the Turks. He agreed and wrote an article. We do not know if what he wrote was much changed by Wellington House, because the relevant records are burned, but we know he wrote the article. We do know that once Mark Sykes' article was finally done a deal was made with the London Times to not only have it published, but also to buy a hundred thousand off-prints. The Times patriotically suggested a good price and the Foreign Office patriotically haggled with them for an even lower price. Forty pounds was paid for a hundred thousand copies.

The article, which was printed at The Times and reprinted all over the United States, used words such as "a merciless oppressor," "a remorseless bully," "pure barbarians," "degenerate," and "has strewn the earth with ruins." It was one of the nicer propaganda works, actually. Sykes fabricated quotes from the Ottoman government. once again. Or perhaps Talat Pasha kindly told him of his plans. If you wish, you can believe he was in contact with the Ottoman government. Among the truly amazing things he wrote are statements such as that the Turks had invaded and destroyed Baghdad. The historians in the audience are shaking their heads. It was the Mongols, of course. Sykes knew much better. Conflate the history of the Turks and the Mongols? Put all the harm caused by the Mongols on the shoulders of the Turks? Well, you can get away with these things it you know that those who will read the article have no idea about the history. But Sykes knew the truth.

Lloyd George and the Foreign Office were both very happy. Thirty two thousand copies of this publication were sent to the United States alone.

Arnold Toynbee

And now Amold J. Toynbee, in many ways a great historian, at least a much respected and revered historian in many quarters. In nothing Toynbee wrote on the Armenians was there ever an indication of who his employers were, which was Wellington House, the propaganda bureau. He retained the image of a scholar who was writing on his own, or perhaps in collusion, or perhaps collusion isn't the best word, cooperation with others.

We will go over his first title, The Armenian Atrocities, the Murder of a Nation, only briefly. I will not say much about the book itself other than to say it was an extended catalogue of evils of the Turks. Toynbee mentioned therein that the Armenian refugees who had come to Alexandria were suffering terribly, that they were starving, that they were "dying of disease, exposure and starvation." This, of course, caused the British in Alexandria who were taking care of these people to he a bit upset. The heads of the British agencies in Alexandria wrote back to the Foreign Office bitterly complaining, saying, "What do you mean? We are feeding these people, they are not dying of starvation and disease. Both births and deaths are both completely normal." Toynbee apologized.

The other book, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks is interesting for some of its quotes and as an example of the kind of book that was created by Wellington House. I will just describe a few representative selections: Toynbee stated the Turks were engaged in the "maiming and warping of more gifted peoples." This, he wrote, had occurred throughout Turkish history. From the beginning, Turks had maimed and warped "more gifted" peoples. The racist qualities of such a statement need no elaboration. In 1913, according to Toynbee, Turks had been engaged in exterminating the Albanians. "Absolute lies," is all you can say. After the Balkan wars Turks "exterminated all Greeks and Slavs left in their territory." This may surprise those Greeks who survived to fight against the Turks in their independence war — according to Toynbee they had all been killed. He related that Turks had attacked the Arabs, and that Turks were indeed planning right then to exterminate all the Arabs. Turks had no civilization: "They had nothing but the military tradition of violence and cunning." Perhaps a bit intemperate. In fact, an incredible diatribe of a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Bryce: Turcophobe par excellence

But the book I want to concentrate on, because it is the one that has been most discussed lately, including in the House of Lords. is a book called The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. As you can see, even for a command paper this is a weighty tone. Lord Bryce, the putative author of this book, was a long standing friend of Armenians and enemy of Turks. He was the founder of an Anglo-Armenian Association in 1893. He was very important to the propaganda bureau because he was so respected. He was the President of the British Academy, a former cabinet minister and a very important figure, especially in the United States. You have surely noticed this quality among some Americans, the way they fawn on the British. It is a really strange cultural phenomenon, and a very old one. This was definitely the case with Bryce, who was loved in America, partly because as the British Ambassador he had been such a friend of the United States, partly because he had written a history of the United States, the American Commonwealth, which glossed over all of our faults and sang many high praises of our limited goods. An American would not have written in such a laudatory tone.

The official story was that Bryce, who had friends who were Armenians, had been reading notes sent by Armenians, and that he had decided he had better collect the facts and write a book about it. So he asked Toynbee, who was, I forget the words he used, "a notable young scholar and researcher," something like that. He asked Toynbee if he would compile a book. They then presented the book to Lord Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Lord Grey in turn presented it to Parliament. Parliament was so impressed by it that they asked it to be published as a "command" book. In fact that is not at all what happened. What happened was the Propaganda Bureau asked Bryce for a propaganda volume, and said, "We have this man Toynbee here who is pretty good. He can put it together for you." And that is exactly what happened.

I want to examine the content. The book is six hundred and eighty four pages long and there are so many errors and inconsistencies that we will be here much longer than the time allotted if we consider each of them. We will just talk about the reliability of the sources and the production of the book. One source was letters by Armenians and Armenian organizations. Armenian newspapers were also a source, newspapers like Ararat and Gotchnag. But the biggest sources, the main ones, were American missionaries and missionary organizations. Now, in order to understand why this is a problem, we have to examine those missionaries as sources, something that has not been done in the recent reprint of The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, which also incidentally does not mention that Toynbee worked for the Propaganda Bureau. A digression on Missionaries: The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief was founded in November of 1915. There were other Armenian relief organizations before that. According to the circular that went out when the organization was founded, it was a "non-sectarian" organization. The table shows the board of directors of that organization. We do not have time to go through the whole list, but if you were to do so, you would notice that every single member of the board, except one, was part of the American protestant missionary establishment. The exception, obviously, being Rabbi Wise, who was not a Protestant Missionary. Everyone else was a missionary or a member of a missionary support group. Many of them had been through the mission field at some point or other.

The leaders of the main missionary groups — the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, and others — were all members of these organizations. "Secretary" meant the boss in these organizations. These people began their new mission to aid the Armenians with a relatively small pamphlet, in which they identified why people should help their organization. It began, of course, with atrocity propaganda. Naturally Talat Pasha was spuriously quoted once again. Talat Pasha supposedly said, "the Armenians would pray for massacre." That is, he was going to treat the Armenians so badly that they would rather be dead. I personally find it hard to believe that he really would have said these things to missionaries.

Table Four. Board of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief

James L. Barton	A Secretary (Head) of the ABCFM
Charles R. Crane	President, Board of Trustees, Constantinople College for Women (missionary college)
Samuel Dutton	Treasurer, Constantinople College for Women
Charles Dodge	Chairman, Board of Trustees, Robert College (missionary college)
D. Stuart Dodge	Member, Board of Trustees, American University of Beirut (missionary college)
Stanley White	Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions.
William Chamberlain	Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Reformed Church.
Samuel Harper	"Beginning a mission to Russia".
Frank Mason	North Secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions
Thomas D. Christie	"Missionary in Anatolia"
William I. Haven	Secretary of the American Bible Society
Charles MacFarland	Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches
Arthur C. James	Member, Board of Trustees of A.U.B.
Edward L. Smith	A Secretary of ABCFM
Edwin Nt. Bulkley	Member of the Presbyterian Board of Missions.
John R. Mott	Representing the YMCA
Rabbi Stephen Wise	Chairman, Jewish Emergency Relief Comm.
George A. Plimpton	Member, Board of Trustees, Constantinople College for Women

The introductory pamphlet spoke of rapes, enslavements, and the "murders of nearly all able-bodied Armenian men above the age of twelve."

The Relief Organization engaged in an eight-year policy of vilifying Turks, from 1915 to 1923. It is interesting that in 1923, once the Turks had won and the Mission obviously would not survive unless they got along with the Turks, suddenly all changed. Suddenly Turks were being praised by missionaries. But until then, the Turks were evil. To build their missionary organization was one of their purposes, but their main purpose was a good one. Their main purpose was to collect money for what indeed were starving Armenian and Syrian (Assyrian) Christians, to try to make sure that these people had food and the orphans had shelter. It was a good purpose. They used a not-so-good means to get the money, which was to vilify the Turks in every way, because there is nothing that draws in funds like portraying a horrible enemy that is oppressing these people and will succeed unless you help, unless you contribute. Which is what they did.

Later on the missionary establishment attempted to get the United States government to actually take over and turn Turkey into an America mandate. They failed that because the American Congress refused, saying, basically, that it would be bad for business and would cost too much.

Studying what they preached unfortunately takes a long time. You must read much truly disgusting literature. What they wrote was not what one would expect of clergymen. Yet one reason they was so successful is exactly that people expected that clergymen would not lie.

We only have time for a few examples. One of the leaders of the missionary propagandists was a man named Rockwell, who I will describe in a moment. He wrote in one of his pamphlets, "Never since the world began has there been such a reign of torture and of butchery as that to which the Ottoman hordes have subjected this helpless and unoffending nation. It is a scheme planned by high and skilled ability [the Germans] and carried out by low brutality [the Turks]."

In all of the writings of the missionaries Turks were never victims; Armenians were always victims. Armenians never killed; Turks always killed. Turks, and I am not exaggerating in any way, Turks persecuted orphans; Turks were cannibals; Turks held auctions of Armenian women; Armenians were a majority all over the east of Anatolia; all young Armenian males had been killed by Turks; all women, every one, were raped by Turks; the Turks hated education and always persecuted the educated; no Christians had ever been part of the Ottoman government. Turks needed Christians because the Turks were racially incapable of being "doctors, dentists, tailors, carpenters, every profession or trade requiring the least skill." And the missionaries wrote that now that the Turks had killed the Armenians, Westerners who were going to have to come in and take over Turkey, because the Turks had rid themselves of the only people with brains, the Armenians, and the Turks could not run the country themselves.

As the missionaries described them, Armenians were happier than the other inhabitants of the Near East. The Muslims had "pinched faces, pale faces, anxious faces, careworn faces, listless faces. hungry faces, sickly faces of little children, and older faces that had grown sour and sullen." But Armenians smiled.