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Turkey: A Past and a Future Part 1
http://www.yerkir.am/en/news/34709.htm
18:18 - 05.11.2012
What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing.
There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War,
and during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by
massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this demoniac
effort after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of
racial and social types that has ever been placed at a single
Government's mercy. The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but
you might search long before you found one among its inhabitants.
These Osmanlis are a governing class, indigenous only in
Constantinople and a few neighboring towns, but planted here and
there, as officers and officials, over the Ottoman territories. They
come of a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth
century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of Christendom,
and crossed with the blood of slave-women from the entire world. They
are hardly a race.
Thus there are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, divided
by blood and vocation and social type; and even if we reckon all who
speak some form of Turkish as one group, they only amount to 30 or 40
per cent. Of the whole population of the Empire.
The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. Those who speak
Arabic are as strong numerically as the Turks, or stronger, but they
too are divided, and their unity is a problem of the future. There are
pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled
in towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the
Muntefik in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan
Koreish, but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race;
there are Arabs in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their
language - most of the peasantry of Syria are such.
The Kurds themselves are more scattered than any other stock in
Turkey, and divided tribe against tribe, but taken together they rank
third in numerical strength, after the Arabs and Turks. There are
mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen and herdsmen, Kurds
who have kept to their original homes along the eastern frontier, and
Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread themselves over the
Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes, the Taurus valleys,
and the hinterland of the Black Sea.
The Greeks and Armenians, for instance, are, or were, the most
energetic, intellectual, liberal elements in Turkey, the natural
intermediaries between the other races and western civilization - "were"
rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless
steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its
subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centers like Smyrna and
Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has
mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As
for the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre
and deportation since April, 1915 - business and professional men,
peasants and shepherds, women and children - without discrimination or
pity. A third of the Ottoman Armenians may still survive; a tenth of
them are safe within the Russian and British lines.
What common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat
of many colors to one political hue? The answer is simple: Blood.
Turkey, the Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geographical,
racial, or economic; it is a pretension, enforced by bloodshed and
violence whenever and wherever the Osmanli Government has power.
The new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate factor to be reckoned
with. It is very new - newer than the Young Turks, and sharply opposed
to the original Young Turkish program - but it has established its
ascendancy. It decided Turkey's entry into the War, and is the key to
the current policy of the Ottoman Government.
The Young Turks were not Nationalists from the beginning; the
"Committee of Union and Progress" was founded in good faith to
liberate and reconcile all the inhabitants of the Empire on the
principles of the French Revolution. At the Committee's congress in
1909 the Nationalists were shouted down with the cry: "Our goal is
organization and nothing else.
But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Liberalism gave way to
Panislamism, Panislamism to Panturanianism, and the "Ottoman State
Idea" changed from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the
Turkification of non-Turkish nationalities by force.
"The Turks realized that, in order to live, they must become
essentially Turkish, become a nation, be themselves.... The Turkish
nation turned aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked
instead upon Turania, the ideal country of the future."
Ziya Bey a Turkish poet had endeavored before to dispense with the 95
per cent. (?) of the vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and
Arabic, and "his poetry had to be published in small provincial papers
because the important newspapers of the towns would not accept it."
The established writers in the traditional style made a hard fight,
but Tekin Alp claims that the Yeni Lisan (New Language) "is to-day in
possession of an absolute and unlimited authority." Borrowed rhythms
have been banned as well as borrowed words, and there is even an
agitation to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish alphabet - an
imitation of the Albanian movement which was opposed so fiercely by
the Turks themselves before the Balkan War.
http://www.yerkir.am/en/news/34709.htm
18:18 - 05.11.2012
What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing.
There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War,
and during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by
massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this demoniac
effort after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of
racial and social types that has ever been placed at a single
Government's mercy. The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but
you might search long before you found one among its inhabitants.
These Osmanlis are a governing class, indigenous only in
Constantinople and a few neighboring towns, but planted here and
there, as officers and officials, over the Ottoman territories. They
come of a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth
century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of Christendom,
and crossed with the blood of slave-women from the entire world. They
are hardly a race.
Thus there are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, divided
by blood and vocation and social type; and even if we reckon all who
speak some form of Turkish as one group, they only amount to 30 or 40
per cent. Of the whole population of the Empire.
The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. Those who speak
Arabic are as strong numerically as the Turks, or stronger, but they
too are divided, and their unity is a problem of the future. There are
pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled
in towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the
Muntefik in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan
Koreish, but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race;
there are Arabs in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their
language - most of the peasantry of Syria are such.
The Kurds themselves are more scattered than any other stock in
Turkey, and divided tribe against tribe, but taken together they rank
third in numerical strength, after the Arabs and Turks. There are
mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen and herdsmen, Kurds
who have kept to their original homes along the eastern frontier, and
Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread themselves over the
Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes, the Taurus valleys,
and the hinterland of the Black Sea.
The Greeks and Armenians, for instance, are, or were, the most
energetic, intellectual, liberal elements in Turkey, the natural
intermediaries between the other races and western civilization - "were"
rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless
steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its
subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centers like Smyrna and
Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has
mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As
for the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre
and deportation since April, 1915 - business and professional men,
peasants and shepherds, women and children - without discrimination or
pity. A third of the Ottoman Armenians may still survive; a tenth of
them are safe within the Russian and British lines.
What common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat
of many colors to one political hue? The answer is simple: Blood.
Turkey, the Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geographical,
racial, or economic; it is a pretension, enforced by bloodshed and
violence whenever and wherever the Osmanli Government has power.
The new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate factor to be reckoned
with. It is very new - newer than the Young Turks, and sharply opposed
to the original Young Turkish program - but it has established its
ascendancy. It decided Turkey's entry into the War, and is the key to
the current policy of the Ottoman Government.
The Young Turks were not Nationalists from the beginning; the
"Committee of Union and Progress" was founded in good faith to
liberate and reconcile all the inhabitants of the Empire on the
principles of the French Revolution. At the Committee's congress in
1909 the Nationalists were shouted down with the cry: "Our goal is
organization and nothing else.
But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Liberalism gave way to
Panislamism, Panislamism to Panturanianism, and the "Ottoman State
Idea" changed from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the
Turkification of non-Turkish nationalities by force.
"The Turks realized that, in order to live, they must become
essentially Turkish, become a nation, be themselves.... The Turkish
nation turned aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked
instead upon Turania, the ideal country of the future."
Ziya Bey a Turkish poet had endeavored before to dispense with the 95
per cent. (?) of the vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and
Arabic, and "his poetry had to be published in small provincial papers
because the important newspapers of the towns would not accept it."
The established writers in the traditional style made a hard fight,
but Tekin Alp claims that the Yeni Lisan (New Language) "is to-day in
possession of an absolute and unlimited authority." Borrowed rhythms
have been banned as well as borrowed words, and there is even an
agitation to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish alphabet - an
imitation of the Albanian movement which was opposed so fiercely by
the Turks themselves before the Balkan War.