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Armenia And The Turks In The Time Of Lawrence

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  • Armenia And The Turks In The Time Of Lawrence

    ARMENIA AND THE TURKS IN THE TIME OF LAWRENCE
    Benny Morris

    The National Interest Online
    http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/armenia-the-turks-the-time-lawrence-4992
    March 8 2011

    While Colonel T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") sympathized with
    Armenian aspirations for sovereignty and, indeed, in a map he drew up
    after the Great War of a desirable Middle Eastern share-out of the
    Ottoman Empire he provided for an independent Armenia (in Cilicia),
    he was also party to the prevalent anti-Armenian prejudices of his day.

    Lawrence was a member of the British delegation to the 1919 postwar
    Paris peace conference. On November 3 he told Frank Polk, the American
    "Commissioner" in Paris, that the Armenians were prone to lend "money
    at exorbitant rates of interest" and took "the Turks' land or horses
    in security for payment," and this at least in part explained the
    Turkish atrocities against them during World War I.

    But there was another factor. "Armenians," he told Polk, as related in
    Polk's report on their conversation, "have a passion for martyrdom,
    which they find they can best satisfy by quarrelling with their
    neighbors . . . They can be relied upon to provoke trouble for
    themselves in the near future."

    In general, Lawrence felt, "it would be most undesirable to attempt
    to establish an Armenian state." Except in a specific territory,
    where they would be overwhelmingly preponderant. "The idea of an
    Armenian State infuriates all the other races, and it would require
    5 divisions of troops (100,000 troops) to maintain it."

    According to Lawrence, the Turks had been exhausted by the Great War
    and their "army is rotten with venereal disease and unnatural vice."

    Hence, their birth rate was falling. He thought that if the Turks were
    "confined to their own territories, in thirty years' time [Turkey]
    would once more be bounding with health and, incidentally, lusting
    for conquest." (Perhaps Lawrence's use of the words "vice" and "lust"
    were influenced by his personal experiences during the war years.)

    About his friend the Emir Faisal, the military leader of the Arab
    Revolt and the de facto ruler at the time in Damascus, Lawrence
    said that he was "cautious, moderate, usually honest but capable of
    treachery if it suited him."

    Surprisingly, Lawrence told Polk that "the Jews get on well with
    the Arabs " and added that, contrary to prevailing opinion at the
    time among British officials, "the Jew is a good cultivator both in
    Palestine and Mesopotamia [he was speaking here of Iraqi Jews]." The
    problem was that "the conditions [in the Middle East] preclude
    enterprise in the shape of improvements and [the Jew] requires five
    shillings a day to live on against the Arab's or Syrian's sixpence
    [i.e., half a shilling: there were twenty shillings to the pound
    sterling]."

    Lawrence concluded by saying that "the Zionist movement has 'many
    prophets but no politicians' [had he lived into the 21st century he
    would have thought otherwise] . . . The movement has been mismanaged
    in the last nine months," he thought.

    He offered Polk one general, final reflection about the Middle Eastern
    peoples: "No nation must expect gratitude from the East or anything
    but the 'Order of the Boot' as soon as they can manage it [meaning
    that the Arabs or the Turks would boot out foreign powers as soon as
    they could affect it, no matter how beneficial these powers had been
    to the locals in previous years]."




    From: A. Papazian
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