Turkey: A Past and a Future Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill WITH these suggestions, Anatolia and Turkish Nationalism may be dismissed from our survey. Shorn of their pretensions in Armenia and the countries south of Taurus, the Turks may experiment in the art of government without the tragedies which their present domination has brought upon mankind. The other lands and peoples of Western Asia, when they have ceased to be "Turkey," will be restored once more to the civilised world. What forces will shape their growth? Not, even indirectly, the discrowned Turk, for if he were not banned by his crimes he would still be doomed by his incapacity. The relative qualities of the different Near Eastern races are not in doubt. A German teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, who resigned his appointment as a protest against the Armenian atrocities in 1915, thus records his personal judgment in an open letter to the Reichstag: "The Young Turk is afraid of the Christian nationalities?Armenians, Syrians and Greeks?on account of their cultural and economic superiority, and he sees in their religion a hindrance to Turkifying Ein Wort an die Berufenen Vertreter des Deutschen Volkes: Eindriicke eines deutschen Oberlehrers aus der TUrkei, von Dr. Martin Niepage, Oberlehrer an der deutschen Realschule zu Aleppo, z.Zt. Wernigerode." (Printed in the second pamphlet issued by the Swiss Committee for Armenian Relief at Basel; English translation, "The Horrors of Aleppo." London, 1917: Hodder and Stoughton.) them by peaceful means. They must therefore be exterminated or converted to Islam by force. The Turks do not suspect that in so doing they are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting themselves. Yet who is to help Turkey forward if not the Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians, who constitute more than a quarter of the populati...Read More