Turkey: a Past and a Future by Arnold Joseph Toynbee
page 8 of 78 (10%)
page 8 of 78 (10%)
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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. Fortunately half this nation, and the majority of the Greeks, live outside the Ottoman frontiers, and are beyond the Osmanli's power. To compensate for its depopulation of the countries under its dominion, the Ottoman Government, during the last fifty years, has been settling them with Moslem immigrants from its own lost provinces or from other Moslem lands that have changed their rulers. These "Mouhadjirs" are reckoned, from first to last, at three-quarters of a million, drawn from the most diverse stocks--Bosniaks and Pomaks and Albanians, Algerines and Tripolitans, Tchetchens and Circassians. Numbers have been planted recently on the lands of dispossessed Armenians and Greeks. They add many more elements to the confusion of tongues, but they are probably destined to be absorbed or to die out. The Circassians, in particular, who are the most industrious (though most unruly) and preserve their nationality best, also succumb most easily to transplantation, through refusal to adapt their Caucasian clothes and habits to Anatolian or Mesopotamian conditions of life. All this is Turkey, and we come back to our original question: What common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat of many colours 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. It is a complex pretension. The first impulse, and the traditional method by which it has been given effect, came from a little tribe of |
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