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The following has been excerpted from Arnold Toynbee, The
Western Question in Greece and Turkey, 1922
(The numbers for the footnotes do not conform to the original.)
Following the Footnotes section:
2) Greek "Spoilt Child"; Turk
"Whipping Boy"
3) Toynbee and the Armenians
4) Toynbee's "Blue Book" evidence
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The third false antithesis, between civilisation and barbarism, is generally more
picturesquely expressed. The Greeks ‘have Hellen the son of Deucalion to their father,’
while the ‘Unspeakable Turk’ is a ‘nomad from the steppes’ and shares the odium of
the Scythian, the Mongol, and the Hun. This is the greatest nonsense of all. If it is a
question of physical transmission, our Modern Greek contemporaries have about as little
Hellenic blood in their veins as our Osmanli contemporaries have of nomadic. If it is one
of spiritual heritage, I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated that the Hellenic
civilisation of the Ancient Greeks and the Near Eastern civilisation of the Modern Greeks
are totally distinct from one another; that we Westerners have as good a claim as any Near
Easterners to be the true Hellens’ spiritual descendants; and that there is even a
perceptible Hellenistic strain in the Osmanlis’ Middle Eastern culture.
The common statement that Ancient Greek literature was handed down to us by the Modern
Greek refugees from the final wreck of the East Roman Empire in the fifteenth century, is
inexact. The Modern Greeks did copy, preserve, and eventually sell to Western Connoisseurs
the manuscripts of the Ancient authors. They also kept alive a knowledge of the grammar
and vocabulary of the Ancient language. But the part played by Modern Greeks in the
revival of Classical Greek studies in Western Europe and America has been remarkably
small. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards, the whole reconstruction and
reinterpretation of the Greek Classics has been done by Western scholars. The Modern
Greeks provided the texts and the linguistic key, but the most important qualifications of
the Western Grecians were their previous familiarity with the Roman adaptations of Ancient
Greek literature and their membership in a living society which rivalled the greatness of
Hellas in her prime. Koraís, the great Modern Greek scholar who made the fruits of
Western Classical scholarship accessible for the first time to any considerable number of
his fellow-countrymen by editing the Classics with introductions and notes in the Modern
Greek language, went as a young man to the French University of Montpellier to study
medicine; was diverted from technology to scholarship under the influence of his Western
professors; and spent the remaining forty-six years of a long life in Paris, where he
found a more congenial atmosphere for Ancient Greek studies than on the classic soil of
his native Smyrna.
It is worth noting that the differentiation of Near Eastern from Ancient Hellenic culture
came about by a deliberate breach with the past, and not by a tearful parting. The Academy
of Athens, founded by Plato, was not broken up by the Turks. It was closed, in the ninth
century of its existence and just forty years before the first Turks visited
Constantinople,[1] by Justinian, the Near Eastern
sovereign who built Aya Sofía and who figures as a worthy in the legend of Modern Greek
nationalism. Seven philosophers who refused to embrace the Christian religion took refuge
in the dominions of Justinian’s Middle Eastern rival Khosru,[2] and the Persian Government stipulated for the repatriation and
toleration of these last representatives of Hellenic culture in a treaty of peace with the
East Roman Power.[3] The cult of the Olympian gods
survived three centuries longer in the Mani, the most inaccessible promontory of the Morea,
which was cut off from the East Roman Empire by the Slavonic migrations at the close of
the sixth century. But in the latter part of the ninth century, when the Moreot Slavs had
been reduced to subjection, this scandalous survival of Ancient Hellenic usages attracted
the attention of the Constantinople Government. The Olympian cults of the Maniots were
suppressed and the last taint of Hellenism was purged out of the Near Eastern world.[4] The repudiation of the Hellenic tradition had already
been symbolized by a change in the use of names. ‘Hellene’ had come to mean a heathen
outsider, in contrast to the Christian subject of the East Roman Empire. The latter was
the orthodox pattern of the primitive Modern Greek, and Romyós, or ‘East Roman,’ as
has been mentioned in Chapter IV., became the national name in the vernacular. The Modern
Greek merchants and peasantry of the Ottoman Empire only learnt to call themselves
Hellenes from the children of the French Revolution in the West, who delighted to speak of
Switzerland as the Helvetian Republic and to have their portraits painted in the costume
of Roman Senators. This classical affectation was a Western fashion which the Modern
Greeks borrowed with other promiscuous properties of our puppet-show, just as the
classical scholarship of Koraís was a part of his enlightened advocacy of Western culture
among his fellow-countrymen.
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This profound student who so impressed by the alienness of the Near Eastern spirit
both from the Modern West, to which he had given his spiritual allegiance, and from
Ancient Hellenism, to which he turned for the same inspiration as his Western
models, that in his writings he frequently attacked the greatest of all Near Eastern
institutions, the East Roman Empire.
‘If the Graeco-Roman Emperors had given to the education of the race a small part
of that attention which they gave to the multiplication of churches and monasteries,
they would not have betrayed the race to other rulers more benighted than
themselves. For all the evils which we have suffered from the maniac Moslems, we are
indebted to those fleshly and material-minded Christian Emperors.’ [5]
Koraís’s verdict is borne out by the following passage from the memoirs [6] of his contemporary Theódhoros Kolokotrónis,
one of the most celebrated Moreot captains in the War of Independence:--
‘In my young days,[7] when I might have learnt
something, schools and academies did not exist. There were hardly a few schools in
which they learnt to read and write. The old-fashioned hoja-bashys, who were the
local notables, hardly knew how to write their own names. The majority of
arch-priests knew nothing but their ritual, and that only by picking it up; not one
of them had been properly taught. The Psalter, Chant Book, Book of Offices, and
other prophetical works were the books I read. It was not till I went to Zante [8] that I came across the history of Greece in
plain Greek. The books I read often were the History of Greece, the History of
Aristoménis and Gorgó, and the History of Iskender Beg. It was the French
Revolution and Napoleon, to my mind, that opened the eyes of the world.’
The klepht was as well aware as the scholar of the quarter from which light and
warmth were beginning to radiate through the Near and Middle Eastern dusk. Neither
of them tried to pretend that the sun that was showing its face in their western
heavens was a refracted image of Ancient Hellenic Hyperion, who had descended for
ever into the shadowy underworld. That myth is one of the extravagances of Western
Philhellenism.
Equally extravagant is the frequent reference of anything that is or is thought to
be objectionable in Osmanli psychology and institutions to the influence of nomadism.[9] ‘Grass does not grow where the Turkish
horse-hoof has trod!’ Whichever conquered nationality invented this much-quoted
proverb had evidently no acquaintance with the economics of life on the steppes. Had
the metaphor any relation to reality, those primaeval Turks who first took to
stock-breeding would not have survived their first twelve months in business, for
the nomad moves in an annual orbit, and drives his herds each season over the ground
on which he has pastured them at the same season the year before. His perpetual
motion is not a symptom of waywardness and perversity. It is as scientific as the
agriculturist’s rotation of crops or performance of different operations in
different fields at different times of year. Both are perpetually shifting the scene
of their activities in order not to exhaust a particular parcel of ground. There is
only a quantitative difference in the range of their oscillation, conditioned by the
difference between their media of productivity. The nomad, ranging widely in order
to convert grasses into human food through chemical transformations in the bodies of
tame animals, regards the agriculturist as a stick-in- the-mud. The agriculturist,
raising edible seeds and roots in sufficient quantities out of a much smaller area
of land, regards the nomad as a vagabond.
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There would be nothing more in this than the common-place mutual contempt of different
trades, if the frontiers between nomad’s land and peasant’s land were stable. On his
own ground, each of them is following that mode of life which the experience of
generations has shown to be economically the most productive. He is in equilibrium with
his environment and therefore more or less harmless and amiable. In fact, the nomad who
visits the peasant or the peasant who visits the nomad at home is generally agreeably
surprised at the courtesy of his reception. ‘Those splendid horse-dairy-farmers the
Abioi, who live on a milk diet and are the justest of mankind,’ is the earliest
reference to the Central Asian nomads that I know of in the literature of a sedentary
society,[10] and if nomads were literary-minded, I
daresay they would compliment us occasionally in equally gracious phraseology. The
traditional bitterness between peasant and nomad arises from a physical cause for which
neither is to blame. Their respective environments and the frontiers between them are
subject to periodic change. Recent meteorological research indicates that there is a
rhythmic alternation, possibly of world-wide incidence between periods of relative
desiccation and humidity,[11] which causes alternate
intrusions of peasants and nomads into one another’s spheres. When desiccation reaches a
degree at which the steppe can no longer provide pasture for the quantity of cattle with
which the nomads have stocked it, the herdsmen swerve from their beaten track of annual
migration and invade the surrounding cultivated countries in search of food for their
animals and themselves. On the other hand, when the climatic pendulum swings back and the
next phase of humidity attains a point at which the steppe becomes capable of bearing
cultivated roots and cereals, the peasant makes his counter-offensive upon the pastures of
the nomad. Their respective methods of aggression are very dissimilar. The nomad’s
outbreak is as sudden as a calvary charge, and shatters sedentary societies like the
bursting of some high explosive. The peasant’s is an infantry advance. At each step he
digs himself in with mattock or steam-plough, and secures his communications by building
roads or railways. The most striking recorded examples of nomad explosion are the
intrusions of the Turks and Mongols, which occurred in what was probably the last dry
period but one.[12] An imposing instance of peasant
encroachment is the subsequent eastward expansion of Russia. Both types of movement are
abnormal, and each is extremely unpleasant for the party at whose expense it is made. But
they are alike in being due to a single uncontrollable physical cause, and it is as
erroneous to attribute its workings to human wickedness in the one case as in the other.
Yet while the intrusive nomad has been stigmatized as an ogre, the intrusive peasant has
either escaped observation or has been commended as an apostle of civilisation. The
reasons for this partiality are clear. One is that the nomad’s tactics are more dramatic
than the peasant’s and make a correspondingly greater impression on the imagination. The
other is that history is written for and by the sedentary populations, which are much the
most numerous and sophisticated portion of mankind, while the nomad usually suffers and
pines away and disappears without telling his tale. Yet, if he did put it on record, he
might paint us as monsters.
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The relentless pressure of the cultivator is probably more painful in the long run,
if one happens to be the victim of it, than the nomad’s savage onslaught. The
Mongol raids were over in two or three generations; but the Russian colonisation,
which has been the reprisal for them, has been going on for more than four hundred
years—first behind the Cossack lines, which encircled and narrowed down the
pasture-lands from the north, and then along the Trans-Caspain Railway, which
stretched its tentacles round their southern border. From the nomad’s point of
view, a peasant Power like Russia resembles those rolling and crushing machines with
which Western industrialism shapes hot steel according to its pleasure. In its grip,
the nomad is either crushed out of existence or racked into the sedentary mould, and
the process of penetration is not always peaceful. The path was cleared for the
Trans-Caspian Railway by the slaughter of Türkmens at Gök Tepé.[13] But the nomad’s death-cry is seldom heard. During the European
War, while people in England were raking up the Ottoman Turks’ nomadic ancestry in
order to account for their murder of 600,000 Armenians, 500,000 Turkish-speaking
Central Asian nomads of the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy were being exterminated—also
under superior orders—by that ‘justest of mankind’ the Russian muzhik. Men,
women, and children were shot down, or were put to death in a more horrible way by
being robbed of their animals and equipment and then being driven forth in winter
time to perish in mountain or desert. A lucky few escaped across the Chinese
frontier.[14] These atrocities were
courageously exposed and denounced by Mr. Kerensky in the Duma before the first
Russian Revolution, but who listened or cared? Not the Tsar’s Government, nor the
great public in the West.
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Arnold
Toynbee in 1961 |
So much, in vindication of the genus Hun. But
even on the assumption that they are a generation of vipers, is nomadic ancestry as
irretrievable as original sin? If it is, then where are we to stop? We may give up
the nomad-descended Near Eastern Bulgars, and even the Westernised Magyars, as lost
souls. (After all, they were both on the wrong side of the War!) But what about all
the other nations of the Western world—including incidentally the French, the
Belgians, the Italians, and ourselves—who speak languages of the Indo-European
family?[15] Does not our speech be[t]ray us and
convict us of the ineffaceable nomadic taint? Where did these languages come from?
Our Western philologists trace them back to the same steppes from which the Turanian
languages issued later. At any rate, the migrants who propagated one branch of
Indo-European speech in Persia and India must have crossed the steppe to get there,
and could hardly have lived except by practising the nomad economy on their way.[16] Yet their dubious origin is never cast up
against the speakers of the modern Iranian and Prakrit vernaculars, even by those
Westerners who are least inclined to believe that natives of India will ever be
capable of governing themselves. Not only the morphology of the Sanskrit language,
but the mythology and institutions of those proximate descendants of nomads who
first gave that language its literary form, have been extravagantly admired by
Westerners too fastidious to overlook the nomadic ancestry of the Osmanli Turks.
Such inconsistencies make havoc of the prejudice that nomads generically are
abominable, and few words need be wasted in exposing the fallacy in the case of the
Osmanlis. It has been mentioned in Chapter IV. that, for good or evil, they have
actually inherited an infinitesimal quantity of nomadic blood; and in Chapter I.
some allusion has been made to their experiment in governing sedentary subjects by
an adaptation of nomadic institutions. If they are to be condemned because that
experiment broke down, or because they have bungled in borrowing Western
institutions as a substitute, they cannot fairly be accused at the same time of
never having got out of their unfortunate nomadic habits. An unprejudiced study of
Ottoman history does point to the conclusion that, down to the latter part of the
seventeenth century, their secular institutions (apart from the immense field
covered by the system of Islam) were to a large extent conditioned by their nomadic
antecedents. But it indicates equally strongly that, at any rate since the time of
Sultan Mahmud II. (1808-1839), the traces of nomadic influence upon their social
life and politics have disappeared.
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The
best commentary on all this false history and false sentiment which prejudice the
thoughts of the Western public... is the judgment of those Westerners who speak from
personal experience...
They find [the Turk] no less honest in
his dealings, no less admirable in his character, and no less pleasant as a companion. |
The best commentary on all this false history and false sentiment which prejudice the
thoughts of the Western public about the Greeks and the Turks (on the rare occasions when
it thinks about them at all) is the judgment of those Westerners who speak from personal
experience. They are few in number, but they are mostly educated men, and the different
vocations which have drawn them to the Near and Middle East enable them to see the
situation from independent points of view. Some have gone as business men, others as
soldiers, others as doctors, others as consuls, others as missionaries. Any point on which
the majority of these diverse first-hand observers agree, cannot easily be dismissed as a
delusion; yet they are almost unanimous [17] in the
verdict that, as an individual human being in the local environment, the Turk is not the
Greek’s inferior. They find him no less honest in his dealings, no less admirable in his
character, and no less pleasant as a companion.
This consensus among Westerners who have had direct relations with both
nationalities cannot possibly be the product of Turkish propaganda.
In the first place, the people who hold this view have formed it as the result of
experience...
Secondly, the Turks, as a nation, are almost ludicrously innocent
of the propagandist’s art.
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This consensus among Westerners who have had direct relations with
both nationalities cannot possibly be the product of Turkish propaganda. In the first
place, the people who hold this view have formed it as the result of experience; and,
secondly, the Turks, as a nation, are almost ludicrously innocent of the propagandist’s
art. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern social conventions has restricted
those forms of personal contact on which propaganda (as well as the more reputable forms
of self-revelation) largely depends. The revolution in the position of Turkish women,
which has been in progress for the last ten years, is beginning to break this barrier
down, but it is still there. In addition to this material obstacle, there are subjective
inhibitions. The Turks are aware of the prejudice against them that exists in Western
minds, and are inclined to despair of the possibility of overcoming it. This pessimism
arises partly from discouraging experiences and partly from pride, for the Turks have not
lost possession of their distinctive Middle Eastern civilisation. It may have been a
failure; it may even be inherently inferior to that of the West, yet it is, after all, a
system of life which is a law unto itself and has its own standards and ideals. The more
the West displays contempt and aversion, the more it discourages the Middle East from the
pursuit of a modus vivendi and impels it to retire into itself. If there is any question
of propaganda, it is on the other side. This questionable art, which is unfortunately
characteristic of Western culture (the very name having originated in the bosom of our
greatest Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church) has been acquired by the Greeks
with uncommon virtuosity. The Greek colonies in the principal urban centres of the Western
world, with their intimate affiliations—through business, naturalisation, and
intermarriage—with ‘influential circles’ of Western society, are admirably equipped
for practising it. They will themselves be the first to admit that they have not neglected
their opportunity. This is not to their discredit, but it does suggest that the influence
of propaganda is to be traced in the second-hand opinions of the majority of the Western
public that has stayed at home, rather than in the first-hand experience of the minority
that has been in contact with the Greeks an the Turks in their native surroundings.
The natural explanation of this minority’s judgment is that it is correct, in so far as
categorical judgments are applicable at all in a realm of relativity, where the positions
of Greeks, Turks, and Westerners are changing all the time in respect of one another. If
‘suggestion’ plays any part, it is rather an ‘inverse suggestion’ set up by the
false prejudice with which the Western observer on the spot has previously been
indoctrinated. The mental associations of ‘Christianity,’ ‘Europe,’ and ‘Hellenism,’
which the Modern Greeks have taken such pains to attach to their own image in Western
minds, are really prejudicial to them. Because (as I have tried to show) they do not
correspond to the facts, they cause embarrassment as soon as Greeks and Westerners who
have theoretically accepted them attempt to establish personal relations. Each finds
himself in a false position. The Greek assumes a character which he does not possess. He
poses as a scion of Ancient Hellenic society, who has rejoined his long-lost Western
brother after an interval of adversity, due to the accident of a brutal barbarian
conquest. The Westerner, on his side, starts from the generous assumption that the only
essential difference between them consists in his own accidental better fortune, and that
if the Greek bears the marks of what he has been through, it is only delicate to draw a
veil over a temporary infirmity. From the moment of contact, however, these mutual
assumptions begin to break down, and the process of disillusionment is so awkward, and
sometimes even painful, for the Western party to the relationship that he tends to bring
it to an end and to avoid its renewal. In fact, he often cherishes a quite unjust
resentment against the Modern Greek, because the latter does not come up to expectations
which he would never have entertained if he had exercised his judgment. It is not to the
interest of either Greeks or Westerners that this source of misunderstanding should be
perpetuated.
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Footnotes
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1. The Academy was closed in A.D. 529; the
first ambassadors from the Khan of the earlier Turkish Empire in Central Asia
arrived at Constantinople in A.D. 569.
2. It must be admitted that the Hellenic
philosophers did not find themselves at home at the Middle Eastern court.
3. In A.d. 533.
4. See Konstandínos Porphyroyénnitos
(=’Constantine Porphyrogenitus’): On the Administration of the [East Roman]
Empire, ch. 1. (ed. by Bekker, I., Bonn, 1840, Weber).
5. Koraís: Apánthisma Epistolón, pp.
46-7; cp. pp. 4 and 133 (Athens, 1839).
6. Kolokotrónis, Th.: Dhiíyisis
symbándon tis Elinikìs Phylis (1770-1836), 2 nd ed. (Athens, 1889, Estía).
7. He was born in 1770.
8. An island then under British
occupation, which had been under almost uninterrupted Western government for the
preceding six centuries. Upper-class Zantiots used to complete their education in
Italian universities.
9. So subtle a writer as Sir Charles
Eliot seems to slip into this rut in his brilliant book on Turkey in Europe (revised
edition, London, 1907). In describing the proclivity shown even by cultivated and
well-to-do Turks for living from hand to mouth, taking things as the find them, and
omitting to furnish their houses or to keep them in repair, he suggests that it may
be due to some kind of inherited nomadic instinct. I feel great diffidence in
criticising an observer of such ability and penetration, but a comparison between
accounts of Modern Turkey and of the Southern States of the American Union before
the Civil War suggests to my mind what is perhaps a less far-fetched explanation. If
one reads standard descriptions of the South, like Olmsted’s, one cannot fail to
be struck by the apparent resemblance, in this very respect, between old Southern
and contemporary Turkish life and manners. Can one discover a common cause? I
believe that one can. In both societies there was the conjunction of a racial
ascendency with an abnormal mobility of population. In the South it was a white
ascendency over Negroes, in Turkey a Middle Eastern ascendency over Near Easterners.
In America the movement of population was due to the economic attraction of the
untenanted West, in the Ottoman Empire to the eviction of the outlying Turkish
minorities by their former Near Eastern subjects. But this conjunction of
circumstances, however brought about, might well have the same rather demoralising
and unsettling effect upon the ruling element in either society, and a very natural
form of it would be the encouragement of the proclivity described above, for which
we have the testimony in either case of independent observers. On this
interpretation, the proclivity itself might be recent and temporary.
10. Iliad, Book XIII., lines 5-6. Cf.
Herodotus, Book IV., chaps. xxiii. and xxvi., and almost every traveller who has
visited the nomads at home.
11. See Dr. Ellsworth Huntington’s
works passim, but especially The Pulse of Asia (Boston and New York, 1907, Houghton
Mifflin Co.), and The Climatic Factor as illustrated in Arid America (Washington,
D.C., 1914, Carnegie Institution).
12. Research has not yet proceeded far
enough on the meteorological side to infer the length of period with any certainty
from the scientific data. But the historical records of movements of population
produced by this now well-established physical cause, point to a total period-length
of 600 years between the respective ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ maxima. We are probably
at present in the early stages of a ‘wet’ phase, the last ‘dry’ phase having
extended from about 1550 to 1850, the preceding ‘wet’ phase from 1250 to 1550,
and the previous ‘dry’ phase—of which the Turkish and Mongol explosions were a
consequence—from A.D. 950 to 1250.
13. In 1881.
14. For details see Czaplicka, M.A.:
The Turks of Central Asia in History and at the Present Day (Oxford, 1918, Charendon
Press), p. 17. The respective estimates of the total numbers of murdered Kazaks and
Armenians are both conjectural.
15. The only populations in Western
Europe, besides the Magyars, who speak non-Indo-European languages are the Finns and
Lapps (incidentally both ‘Turanian’), and the Basques—honourable exceptions,
but hardly numerous enough to save our reputation!
16. This conjecture is supported by
the fact that the Iranian and Sanskrit names for the staple agricultural instruments
are not derived from the same roots as those common to so many Indo- European
languages on our side of the Central Asian steppe. It looks as if the ‘proto-Aryas’
lost the use of these implements during their migration and rediscovered or borrowed
them independently.
17. The chief exceptions are, of
course, to be found among the missionaries, but (i) whenever I have heard the
maintain the superiority of non-Western Christians over Moslems, it has been a
priori and not with reference to their own experience; and (ii) a strong party among
them take the same view as other Western residents.
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More from Toynbee:
Greek "Spoilt Child"; Turk "Whipping Boy" |
(Emphasis below is Holdwater's)
The Greek assumes a character which he does not possess. He poses as a
scion of Ancient Hellenic society, who has rejoined his long-lost Western brother after an
interval of adversity, due to the accident of a brutal barbarian conquest. The Westerner,
on his side, starts from the generous assumption that the only essential difference
between them consists in his own accidental better fortune, and that if the Greek bears
the marks of what he has been through, it is only delicate to draw a veil over a temporary
infirmity. From the moment of contact, however, these mutual assumptions begin to break
down, and the process of disillusionment is so awkward, and sometimes even painful, for
the Western party to the relationship that he tends to bring it to an end and to avoid its
renewal. In fact, he often cherishes a quite unjust resentment against the Modern Greek,
because the latter does not come up to expectations which he would never have entertained
if he had exercised his judgment. It is not to the interest of either Greeks or Westerners
that this source of misunderstanding should be perpetuated.
This phenomenon in the relationships between people of different civilisations is a
commonplace in those between individuals of different classes in the same society. A
cultivated class, for example, finds most difficulty in getting on with another which has
acquired part—but only part—of its culture and customs, and which seeks on this
account to establish the convention that no class-distinction is there, when both parties
are secretly aware of its presence. On the other hand, it is comparatively at ease in its
intercourse with members of one which makes no pretensions to similarity. In this
relationship both parties can be themselves, and they can each enjoy the experience of
discovering the other’s distinctive qualities, without the discomfort of detecting
insincerity in his attitude and their own. Indeed, this relationship inclines people to
be, if anything, unduly charitable. Each party having assumed that the other’s standards
differ— and that legitimately—from his own, is easily led to suspend judgment. A
working-man often makes allowances for an acquaintance who is a gentleman, and a gentleman
for a working-man, which they would not either of them make undesirable as that noted
above in the case of Westerners and Greeks; but it has the same psychological origins, and
neither feature will disappear until the ‘complex’ of prejudice in Western minds has
been removed.
It is imperative to remove it, for unwarrantable prejudice and unwarrantable indulgence do
not in this case counter-balance one another. When you have made a spoilt-child of the
Greek, it is no good rounding on him as an impostor; and when you have used the Turk as a
whipping-boy, you do not heal the stripes that you have inflicted by congratulating him on
his fortitude. Unnatural treatment is made doubly harmful by inconsistency in its
application, and the deplorable effects of Western behaviour towards both nationalities
are written large on the characters of the present generation. In both cases, the evil
that we have done to them exceeds, and will probably outlive, the good.
It is not my intention to minimise the advantages which the Greeks—to consider them
first—have derived from Western goodwill. Our sympathy has stimulated their efforts, our
charitableness encouraged them to retrieve their mistakes, our exceptional
disinterestedness and even generosity towards them has thrown open to them the highest
career as a nation for which they may be qualified by their talents. When they took up
arms for their independence and began to be worsted in an unequal struggle, Great Britain,
France, and Russia agreed on intervention,1 and a few months afterwards the power
of the Ottoman and Egyptian Governments to carry on the war was broken—‘accidentally
on purpose’—by the Allied fleets at Navarino.2 Again, when state organisation
had to be provided for the liberated Greek nation, Western statesmen bestowed on Greece,
from the outset and on their own initiative, that ‘sovereign independence’ which they
and their successors have always refused (in practice if not in theory) to Turkey. The
demand for the realities of this status, formulated in Article 6 of the Turkish National
Pact of 1920, 3 has been stigmatized as ridiculous and impertinent. On the other
hand, the first point settled in a Protocol signed by the three Powers at London on the
3rd February 1830 was that ‘Greece shall form an independent state, and shall enjoy all
the political, economic, and commercial rights attaching to complete independence.’ Yet,
at that date, the Greeks had given no proof of capacity for self-government. They had
fought two civil wars before they were half-way through their war against the Turks,
squandered their Western loans, and generally ignored their Western advisers. The grant of
sovereign independence in these circumstances was an act of faith on the part of Western
statesmen, and if it has been justified by the event in Greece, they might be well advised
to repeat the experiment for the benefit of Turkey.
At the same time, Greece has, on the whole, received greater injury than advantage from
the Western attitude towards her during the first century of her independent existence.
The general stimulus to her vitality and the concrete services rendered to her are
outweighed by the demoralising effects upon her national character. We have encouraged
her to be conceited and pharisaical—to over-estimate her own merits and achievements,
and to ignore the qualities of the Turk (in spite of the fact that those qualities gave
him the dominion over her for four centuries). Taking as their standard of comparison
their respective degrees of Westernisation, the Greeks have learnt to regard the Turks as
immeasurably their inferiors. They do not realise that their present relative
positions, even in this respect, are only temporary; and having staked their fortunes on
assimilation to the West, they do not suggest that, in the long run, it may prove no
disadvantage to a non-Western people to have remained ‘radically alien to Western
civilisation.’ In national conflicts, it is courting disaster to misconceive the
potentialities of an adversary, and the Anatolian campaign, the history of which has been
narrated in Chapter VI., is an illustration of the misfortunes which Greece has several
times brought upon herself by this error of judgment. But the worst elements introduced
into the Greek character by intercourse with the West have been the more impalpable
weaknesses of superficiality and lack of originality. Having by our sympathy stimulated
the Greeks to make efforts, we have often tempted them to relax them by premature and
insincere commendation; and by placing our spiritual heritage unreservedly at their
disposal, we have led them to turn their backs upon their own.
1 Treaty of the 6 th July 1827 for the
Pacification of Greece.
2 On the 20 th October 1827.
3 See Text of the Turkish National Pact, pp. 207-10 above.
Holdwater: Regarding the
emphasized passage in the paragraph above: does that not also perfectly describe the
Armenians?
As much as Arnold Toynbee turned over a new leaf since his Wellington House days, he still could
not let go of the idea of Turkish extermination efforts against the Armenians. Perhaps he
was too deeply Christian, or perhaps
he was a victim of auto-suggestion, after having drowned himself in so much propaganda; or
perhaps he was in denial, having embarked on lies, in patriotic service to his nation.
Whatever the reason or reasons, the following passage should be of great interest to those
who believe the Ottoman government had the "intent" to kill off the Armenians,
and yet have not come face to face with their sins; basically, Toynbee's explanation boils
down to the fact that the Turks can only repent once the West can let go of its prejudice
and hatred:
The Turks have been demoralised in a different way. Certainly we have
avoided killing them by kindness, and if it is wholesome for the character never to be
flattered or favoured and to be thrown upon one’s own resources, we have done them some
negative service in this respect. In fact, the Turks have not only had the discipline of
‘self-help.’ As depositaries of the Caliphate and as the only even quasi-independent
Power surviving in the Middle Eastern world, they have been looked up to by the other
members of Middle Eastern society, and have had to shoulder some part of their burden in
addition to their own immoderate load. This ordeal of acting as bulwarks against Western
aggression might have been preferable to being made, like the Greeks, into protégés of
the Western intelligentsia, if their Western adversaries had shown chivalry or had even
played fair. But unhappily the record of the West in its dealings with Turkey has been not
only ungenerous but unscrupulous...
But, as in the case of Greece, the concrete actions of Western Powers in war and diplomacy
have mattered less, for good or evil, than the overwhelming though imponderable ‘suggestion’
exercised upon the Turkish by the Western mind. We have injured the Turks most by making
them hopeless and embittered. Our skepticism has been so profound and our contempt so
vehement, that they have almost ceased to regard it as possible to modify them by their
own action. They incline to accept these Western attitudes as fixed stars in their
horoscope, with a fatalism which we incorrectly attribute to the teaching of their
religion, without realising that our own conduct has been one of its potent causes. But
while they are discouraged, they are not deadened to resentment. They see us in a light in
which we too seldom look at ourselves, as hypocrites who make self-righteous
professions a cloak for unscrupulous practice; and their master-grievance against us
so fills their minds that it leaves little room for self-examination. If a charge is
brought against them from a Western source, that is almost enough in itself to make them
harden their hearts against it, however just it may be. They do not get so far as to
consider it on its merits. They plead ‘not guilty,’ and put themselves in a posture of
defence, to meet what experience has led them to regard as one of the most effective
strokes in the Western tactic of aggression. In 1921, I seldom found the Turks defend the
fearful atrocities which they had committed six years previously against the Armenians,
but repentance and shame for them were not uppermost in their minds—not, I believe,
because they were incapable of these feelings, but because they were preoccupied by
indignation at the conduct of the Allied Powers in fomenting a war-after-the-war in
Anatolia. Remorse cannot easily co-exist with a grievance, and until we relieve the Turks
of the one, we shall certainly fail, as we have done hitherto, to inspire them with the
other.
In attempting to express and explain the Turkish point of view, I am not seeking to
suggest that it is right, or to deny the charges brought against the Turkish nation and
Government for their treatment of subject peoples during the past century. Their crimes
are undoubtedly exaggerated in the popular Western denunciations, and the similar crimes
committed by Near Eastern Christians in parallel situations are almost always passed over
in silence. At the same time, the facts substantiated against the Turks (as well as
against their neighbours) by authoritative investigation are so appalling that it is
almost a matter of indifference, from the point of view of establishing a case, whether
the embroideries of the propagandists are counterfeit or genuine. The point which I wish
to make is that, if our aim is not simply to condemn but to cure, we can only modify the
conduct of the Turks by altering their frame of mind, and that our only means of doing
that is to change our own attitude towards them. So long as we mete out one measure to
them, another to the Greeks, and yet a third to ourselves, we shall have no moral
influence over them.
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Toynbee
and the Armenians
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In his book's "ADDITIONAL NOTE
ON CHAPTER V," Toynbee explains that "the official apologia of the Greek
Administration" made claims on how well it was taking care of Moslem students
of a captured Turkish school; in contrast:
"My information was to the effect that the Greek Administration had not only
taken over control but had appropriated the endowment to its own purposes. On the
other hand, since I had no time to make a personal visit to the school, and cannot
therefore speak at first hand, I must put on record the Greek as well as the Turkish
version of what was done with regard to it, and must accept the defendant’s
statement unless or until I obtain stronger evidence controverting it.in."
Bravo, Arnold Toynbee. This is the manner in which a real
historian operates, and the manner by which the earlier Toynbee did not operate,
while in service to His Majesty's propaganda division, when he wrote, for example,
1916's Blue Book, "Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire."
He never made "a personal visit" to the areas of the massacres he wrote
about, could not "speak at first hand," and the rare times he referred to
the "Turkish version," he certainly did not "accept the defendant’s statement,"
in the face of his hearsay evidence... the evidence he still could not let go of,
until the end of his life.
It was my belief that he frowned upon his earlier work, denouncing it as "war
propaganda," but I can see in this 1922 book (Ch. VII, THE WAR OF
EXTERMINATION), Toynbee would go on to write: "...hundreds of thousands of
[Armenians] were done to death and thousands turned into robbers and murderers by
the administrative action of a few dozen criminals in control of the Ottoman
Empire." Toynbee's footnote: "Blue Book Miscellaneous No. 31(1916),
pp. 651-3" (there is an examination of this source, below),
or his own war propaganda. Later in this book, he wrote: "The Greeks...
declared that the Turkish villages which they had destroyed had harboured Turkish
bands," adding, "it is quite possible that (as the Turks allege)
there was similar provocation for the atrocities against the Armenians in
1915." As the Turks allege? Did not Toynbee read Boghos Nubar's admission of Armenian belligerence in the Times
of London, two or three years earlier? (Along with countless other examples from
Turk-unfriendly sources?) As wonderful a historian as Arnold Toynbee became after
WWI, his deeply ingrained prejudices simply prevented him from shaking his
extermination-against-Armenians theory .
Here is the theory, in a nutshell, as Toynbee spelled out in later pages:
‘Chetté’ soon became the synonym for ‘komitajy’ in
Anatolia. Turkish ‘political’ chettés made their début in 1914 on the Western
littoral, and in 1915, after being reinforced by convicts released for the purpose
from the public prisons, they carried out the designs of the Union and Progress
Government against the Armenians in every province of Anatolia except the vilayet of
Aidin. The Armenian civil population was ‘deported’ from the villages and towns
and marched off for ‘internment’ under the escort of uniformed gendarmes; but at
the first point on their road out of range of Western observers, the chettés
appeared and executed the massacre. The uniformed gendarmes arrived without their
prisoners at their destination. What had happened? The chettés had waylaid them. It
was unfortunate. The Ottoman Government, faithful to its tradition of clemency, had
intended only to deport the seditious Armenians instead of taking severer measures;
but the chettés, though outlaws, were Osmanlis. Their patriotic indignation had
been too strong for them, and their armament too strong for the gendarmes, so that
the Government could not be blamed for the mishap to the Armenians. The make-belief
was as inept as it was disgusting, yet it was felt to be worth while.
If that was indeed the systematic plan, there would have been not one example of
gendarmes losing their lives defending the Armenians; moreover, no Ottoman would
have been tried for crimes committed against the Armenians. Most importantly, not a
"single" Armenian would have
remained alive, under Ottoman control. (Toynbee himself had written in his "Treatment"
Blue Book that one half million Armenians had survived their marching
orders.) The above is all speculation, not fitting in at all with the professional
historian that Toynbee had become. In addition, he wrote himself in this 1922 book
on how unreliable the Circassians were, some actually joining the Greeks; the ones
who perpetrated crimes against Armenians mostly came from the ranks of non-Turks,
such as Kurds and Arabs. If these tribes were as unmanageable as they often were,
often working against government interests, they certainly could not be counted on
to administer such a large scale program of extermination in conjunction with the
government. It is amazing how the Armenian and missionary-told stories, all obtained
secondhand, were still accepted as factual by the "reformed" Arnold
Toynbee. He deserves credit for finally regarding Turks as human beings with
feelings, and not as subhuman creatures, as he once did; but his prejudices simply
ran too deeply.
(As the book came to a close, Toynbee further wrote that the French in Cilicia
"even permitted the Armenians to raise and arm irregular bands. If the
Armenians took this opportunity to revenge themselves upon the local Turkish
population for what they had suffered [principally from other Turks)] in 1915, they
can hardly be blamed." Incredible! If Toynbee justified such violence
in a Biblical "Eye for an Eye" manner, then he neglects that it was the
Armenians who had fired the first shot, massacring many even shortly before the war
had begun. Those "Turks" who committed crimes against Armenians surely
were acting in revenge mode, for what Armenians had done to their families. Toynbee
then charges that Turkish "atrocities" in both Cilicia and "the
Turkish invasion of the Republic of Erivan in the autumn of 1920... had the same
genesis as the war of extermination in other parts of Anatolia," Yet
Katchaznouni, Armenia's prime minister of the time, himself admitted the 1920 war
was one the Armenians had provoked, and American eyewitnesses — primarily of the
hostile "Near East Relief" variety — verified the Turks were on good
behavior, as one may read on this page.
When it came to Armenians, tainted sources were still perfectly acceptable to Arnold
Toynbee.)
------------------------------
NOTES ON TOYNBEE'S "EVIDENCE":
Christopher Walker informs us of what is meant by "Miscellaneous No. 31,"
in his own propaganda work, “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, p. 385:
"...the Bryce/Toynbee Blue Book (published by the British government as Miscellaneous
no. 31 (1916) and published commercially as The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire)"; while trying to confirm whether "No. 31" was
another Blue Book or the notorious "Treatment" work, I visited an online
version of this material. At first, I thought "No. 31" might have been
"Document 31," which may be found here.
Unfortunately, the online version does not contain page numbers, and I later
realized "Doc. 31" is not what Toynbee alluded to in his all-important,
genocide-proving footnote, pp. 651-53.
But since I perused Document 31, regarding the diary of a missionary
("Published by the board of foreign missions of the Presbyterian Church in the
U.S.A."); it is very representative of the Blue Book, and I don't believe pages
561-53 will contain "evidence" that is more solid than the testimony of
Document 31.
As we can see, this is the testimony of a biased missionary. (Toynbee is on record
for having written "all" of the Blue Book testimony came from
missionaries, which was not true; this may have been an attempt to demonstrate the
credibility of his "evidence," since his Christian audience believed
clergymen would not lie.) Missionaries
possessed a "license from God" to vilify the Turks, as evidenced in their
prayers. If this particular missionary (Miss Mary Schauffler Platt) represents what
Christopher Walker terms as an example of "impartial eye-witnesses" (p.
384 of his book), that says a lot about Mr. Christopher Walker. Miss Platt already
exhibits her deep bias by referring to the enemies of her faith as "evil-minded
Moslems."
But even in the testimony of this religious fanatic, what do we find? Mainly,
everyone was getting killed by typhus, including the Turkish soldiers, and the
missionaries themselves. (Armenians killed by disease are naturally classified as
"genocide victims.") Secondly, the Armenians' oppressors were usually not
the Turks themselves. She even lets the Turks off the hook, at times:
"Here is a Mussulman thief, plundering Christians, shot by the Osmanli
guard, and then brought to us by his friends that we might care for him."
The "Osmanli guard" then was working to preserve law and order, and was
not working in cahoots with the "Mussulman thief."
Miss Platt refers to Lucy, the daughter of a preacher, visiting from Gulpashan, "where
they had been refugees for some time, living in terror of Kurds by day and night.
They also feared the Moslem neighbours and the Turkish guards sent in to protect the
village."
They might have been fearing the non-Kurds because every evil Muslim was regarded as
a potential threat, but it seems the ones who were committing the crimes were the
Kurds. If the Turkish guards were sent in to protect the village, then that is an
"intent"-busting point for the Turks.
"The prisoners taken from the English Mission yards by the Turks were kept
about twenty-four hours, examined, and to the great and unexpected joy of everyone
were set free without ransom. The Turks said they had heard that a Russian spy was
being kept in that yard, and when they found no evidence of this, they set the men
free."
If the Turks were bent on extermination, why would they have set the Christians
free? Obviously, the Christians came under suspicion for colluding with the enemy,
because that is what the Christians — including their missionary benefactors —
usually did. There was a dangerous war going on, with the existence of the Ottoman
nation on the line.
As far as "extermination" proof, I only noticed two references in Document
31:
"Just now two of the young Syrians who are the chief men in helping
with the bread came in and told me that they had received warning secretly that they
had better leave here and hide with some friendly Moslems, as the Turkish Consul is
going to take out all the young men from our yards and other places in the city and
kill them — "wipe them out." I cannot believe that it can be true, but
we cannot know."
That's right. Chalk one up for Miss Platt for not arriving at a rash conclusion,
because what she has heard was "hearsay," and not real evidence.
The second example:
"Some of the young Syrians who guard the gate report that a few days ago a
bunch of Kurds in passing stopped to talk and said: ' We came down here to the plain
with the intention of killing you all...'"
By now, we all know what that means, don't we? "Hearsay." This is exactly
how the local Christian population fooled their missionary benefactors, by making
such claims. Usually, the missionaries accepted such word at face value, because
they knew the Muslims were, as a whole, so "evil-minded."
I took a look at the Blue Book's online version's Table of Contents, to get an idea
of where pp. 651-53 might have fallen. Perhaps it is toward the end of the book,
Chapter "XIX.— VILAYET OF DAMASCUS AND SANDJAK OF DER-EL-ZOR." Here, as
everywhere, the "impartial eye-witnesses" are missionaries and Armenians.
In this section, there is the testimony of an Armenian doctor (Toroyan) who goes to
town in tugging at Christian heartstrings. ("'Tell the gallant soldiers [of
the Allies] to come quickly to Mesopotamia,' they cried to me between their sobs;
'we are worse than dead.'") Nobody is denying that Armenians were
suffering, like everyone else in the empire was suffering, but can't people get it
through their thick skulls that someone such as Dr. Toroyan could have been saying
anything?
Naturally, all of this calculated melodrama had a deep impact on those such as
Arnold Joseph Toynbee; he accepted the propaganda and the hearsay as fact, even
though he had arrived at a point in his life and career when he should have known
better. His and Lord Bryce's Blue Book was a criminal work, designed to spread
prejudice and hatred; we are still — remarkably — contending with its evilness
today.
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See also:
The Mongol Turk
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