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The Hellenic Genocide
Hellenic Genocide: Smyrna
THE
GENOCIDE OF THE EASTERN CHRISTIANS OF THE CITY OF SMYRNA IN 1922
RESEARCHED
AND DOCUMENTED
AS
NEVER BEFORE,
BY
PROFESSOR M. H. DOBKIN
The
outstanding study, SMYRNA
1922: The Destruction of a City,
authored by Professor Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, published by Newmark Press,
NY, NY, USA, in 1998, is available in bookshops as well as online at www.Amazon.com
[Click
here: Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City]
SMYRNA
1922: The Destruction of a City
was first published in 1971. Based on a thorough research of historical
archives, it provides captivating factual documentation with vivid accounts
about the destruction of the City of
Professor
M. H.
Dobkin brings to light suppressed and very little known facts about the
annihilation and deportation of the Christian citizens of Smyrna, whose roots
there went far back thousands of years.
In
September 1922, Mustapha Kemal, the revolutionary ruler of
At
Professor
M. H. Dobkin has been awarded an Honorary Degree (Lit. D.) by Wilson College
for her book Smyrna
1922.
She is Member of the American Center of the International Writer’s
Association PEN, the Author’s Guild, the Modern Language Association, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars and the Institute on the Study
of Genocide.
With
the kind permission of Professor M. H. Dobkin and her Publisher and for the
benefit of Web readers, the Introduction
and
the closing
21st
Chapter XXI of
the
book
SMYRNA 1922
are presented below.
These
excerpts provide an insight into this very fine scholarly work, that reveals
and documents the hidden and silenced historical facts on the destruction of
the city of
SMYRNA
1922
The
Destruction of a City
Marjorie
Housepian Dobkin
NEWMARK
PRESS, New York, N.Y., USA
INTRODUCTION
It
was in the course of a trip eastward through Europe and the Middle East that I
first heard controversy about the burning of Smyrna. In Salonika many of the
inhabitants were refugees from Smyrna, having escaped, they said, from
"the great fire of 1922." They claimed it had been deliberately set
by the Turks to drive out the Christian population. Three weeks later, in
Izmir, I heard the Turkish version of the Smyrna fire: the Greeks had set fire
to the city before abandoning it, after Kemal Ataturk's victory. I resolved
to look into the matter upon my return. By this time history had surely
reached a verdict that was distilled and encapsulated in the Encyclopedia
Britannica.
Under
Clearly
I would have to look further. Scanning the New York Times in microfilm
for the days following September 9, I found the following headlines in the
lead story on September 15, 1922:
SMYRNA
BURNING, 14 AMERICANS MISSING
1,000
MASSACRED AS TURKS FIRE CITY
KEMAL
THREATENS MARCH ON CAPITAL
OUR
CONSULATE DESTROYED
Fire
Starting in Armenian and Greek Quarters is Sweeping City
The
headlines on the sixteenth read: SMYRNA IN RUINS, and on the seventeenth,
still in the lead, SMYRNA WIPED OUT KILLINGS CONTINUE.
Columbia
University's Butler Library contained two books devoted to the burning of
Smyrna in 1922, both written in the years immediately after the fire. One, The
Blight of Asia by American Consul George Horton, an eyewitness, includes a
wealth of detail, although to the contemporary reader the book is somewhat
marred by an excessively impassioned tone. The second, The Great Betrayal
by Edward Hale Bierstadt, contained evidence from "unbiased
sources" which American officials were trying to keep under wraps.
According to the foreword by Edward Capps, former minister from the United
States to Greece, who noted too: "It is a pity that access to the wealth
of material available in the Department of State in Washington ... is still
denied to the public." My editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the late
Hiram Haydn, supported the idea of a book on the burning of Smyrna, assuming
that the materials referred to by Ambassador Capps were by now available. He
agreed that with so many apparent contradictions the story warranted
non-fiction treatment.
Nearly
two years of reading secondary sources on the historical background preceded
my research in the National Archives and the Library of Congress in
Washington, D.C.
It was not a part of my original plan to include the history of Smyrna from
its ancient origins, but its legends and history so enriched my own feelings
for the city that I could not resist using some of the material as the
starting point of my text. The historical background is not only extensive
but it is politically complex and little known to general readers. Moreover,
the story of the Smyrna fire and its aftermath is replete with irony,
perceptible only to readers aware of what went before. For the sake of clarity
I settled on a chronological approach—the "seemingly obligatory quick
gallop through history," as a critic put it, who seems to have considered
the background nonessential—and I continue to envy writers concerned with
dramatic events which are set within more widely known historical contexts.
Aware
of the importance of finding as many Turkish and pro-Turkish sources as
possible, especially as these touch on the two most sensitive areas—the
treatment of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915-16 and events in Smyrna and
environs in 1922—I made a search for these my first priority after
completing my reading of the more remote historical background. In the
sixties, there was a noticeable gap in the volume of materials from any point
of view on the period between 1908, when the Committee of Union and Progress
("the Young Turks") took power, and 1923, which marked the Treaty of
Lausanne and recognition of Kemal Ataturk's Turkish Republic. Yet I did find a
number representing a range of pro-Turkish views between those dates. In his Memoires
of a Turkish Statesman published in English in 1922, Djemal Pasha, third
ranking of the Young Turk leaders, attempted to absolve himself of
responsibility for the Armenian "exterminations," as they were then
called. In our own Barnard College library I was fortunate in having
convenient access to all the works of Halide Edib, in English. Edib had been
among the very first emancipated Turkish women and was for a time Kemal's
chief propagandist. She entered Smyrna with Kemal and was in the city during
the fire, about which she says virtually nothing in her writings. She was a
friend of Barnard's Dean Virginia Gildersleeve and she taught at Barnard in
1927-28. (Gildersleeve herself had ties in Turkey as a Trustee of the
Constantinople Women's College.)
A
more substantial source favoring the Turkish view of the Greco-Turkish war
appeared with Arnold Toynbee's The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, written
in 1922. In 1930, Ahmed Emin Yalman in Turkey and the World War presented what
was at that time the prevailing Turkish view of that country's wartime
treatment of Armenians. Volume 5 of Churchill's series The World Crisis, also
published in 1930, contains pertinent information on the Greco-Turkish war
from the standpoint of British diplomacy which, aside from the disposition of
Lloyd George, by and large favored the Turks—at the least by failing to
support the Greeks. Lord Kinross's definitive biography, Ataturk (1965),
offers much important detail on the Greco-Turkish war and Ataturk's
insurgency (much of it derived from Turkish sources made available to the
author) which I found extremely useful. In books by such experts on modern
Turkish history as Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Robinson, and others, the Armenians
in Turkey during World War I are briefly presented in a chapter summarizing
the whole of Ottoman history to the point at which Kemal's Republic takes up
the burden of the work. This would be fair enough if the presentations made a
clear distinction between cause and effect, between Turkish-Armenians and
Russian-Armenians and hence their respective allegiances during the War, and
between events 1915-16 in Anatolia, and 1918-20 in Transcaucasia. In these
books such distinctions are blurred when not distorted outright, and the
disappearance of the minorities is perceived as beneficial to the new Turkish
Republic.
Among
the abundant archival materials in Washington, D.C. the papers of Admiral Mark
L. Bristol in the Library of Congress were invaluable in reconciling the
differences—indeed the complete reversal of facts—in reports the admiral
received from Smyrna and the reports he sent to the State Department. Unlike
the papers of many national figures donated to archives by relatives who have
combed them in advance, these were given to the library evidently undisturbed
by the admiral's widow. In the Bristol papers I also found an official report
submitted by Fire Chief Paul Grescovich of the Smyrna fire brigade. I have
accompanied its listing under official published sources in my bibliography
with a summary of its contents.
Also
in the Bristol papers is a complete transcript of a London trial in 1924. It
includes exceptionally revealing verbatim testimony by members of the Smyrna
fire brigade and Turkish and pro-Turkish eyewitnesses as well as their
opposite numbers.
For
the Turkish view I should also mention a useful series of bulletins published
between 1920 and 1936 by the French government summarizing articles that
appeared in the Turkish press. These are listed in my bibliography, under
official published sources, as Bulletin Periodique de la Presse Turque. (Summaries
from the Greek press over the same period are also in the Library of
Congress.) Finally, a valuable find was a volume of compiled articles, all
taking positions favoring Turkey, written by leaders of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Near East Relief, the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce for the Levant, and members of the U.S. diplomatic corps who came
together in a "General Committee for the Ratification of the Lausanne
Treaty." Titled A Treaty With Turkey, the volume is listed in my
bibliography under General Committee as no editor is named.
A
stroke of luck early in my search for eyewitnesses led me to Dr. S. Ralph
Harlow, who had been a teacher and religious leader at the American
missionary college for boys, at Paradise, a suburb virtually next door to
Smyrna. In failing health when I found him, Dr. Harlow was as clearheaded as
when he had been voted the most exciting professor at Smith College while I
was a student there.
Tracking
down the American sailors, I found a listing in the Naval Records, of all
those placed on shore duty, and then examined the roster rolls of each U.S.
ship in Smyrna harbor to find the men's serial numbers— indispensable in
obtaining addresses from the Bureau of Naval Personnel of those still alive
and receiving pensions. I was able to locate five former seamen who were
guarding American installations in Smyrna during the days in question. No
officers on the scene were still living.
Greeks
constituted the majority population in Smyrna, while the Armenian community
as a whole (no more than twenty thousand in all) was singled out for the most
brutal treatment, and the fire began in the heart of the Armenian quarter.
Because the voices of Armenian victims are more prominent in this story, some
readers have assumed, erroneously, that the demise of Smyrna is essentially an
Armenian story. The destruction of that once glorious city is actually the
penultimate chapter of the Greek tragedy in Asia Minor.
I
should stress here that in no instance in this book have I invented dialogue;
everything said was quoted, either in an interview or a written record.
After taping half a dozen interviews with escapees from the Smyrna fire I
could see that while there were many variations in detail, and each story
could make up a book in itself, the information derived about the nature of
events did not vary. My sources were able to bring the climactic scenes of
this book vividly to the foreground. I was fortunate, too, to find two members
of the Jewish community in Smyrna able and willing to share their vivid
recollections with me. A more extensive search for oral histories would, I am
certain, have made this book substantially longer but not substantially
different.
I
was at first puzzled by the fact that while most critics considered that I
presented the facts objectively, "letting them speak for
themselves," in the words of Lord Kinross, to a few the book was
"highly charged" or "subjective." In the light of
further reflection I find the contradiction understandable. Some readers
fail to distinguish between the tone taken by a writer and their own emotional
response to material the writer is presenting. A few reviewers have attributed
their own emotional responses in just this way, no doubt.
Since
this book first came out, at least two full-length studies have been published
focusing specifically on Smyrna between 1919 and 1922. In 1973 Ionian
Vision, Greece and Asia Minor 1919-22 by Michael Llewellyn Smith was
published by St. Martin's Press. An expansion of the author's doctoral thesis
at Oxford, it covers much of the ground that appears here, but with emphasis
on British and some Greek sources. The author concludes that Turkish
soldiers burned Smyrna. He has, however, taken Bristol's Report of the
International Commission on the Greek Landings of May 1919 at face value, and
has accepted the admiral's figure of one to two thousand fatalities in the
Smyrna fire.
In
1984 Victoria Solomonides completed her doctoral dissertation titled "The
Greek Administration of the Vilayet of Aidin 1919-22" for King's College,
University of London. Her investigations concern primarily the problems faced
by Aristedes Sterghiades, the ranking administrative official during the
Greek occupation of Smyrna, in the years preceding the entry of the Turkish
forces. Solomonides describes the conditions under which the Greek
administration had to operate. For political reasons Greek
Solomonides'
research confirmed my analysis of the prevailing political situation among the
Allied powers and their respective positions. Her study points to evidence in
the Italian archives supporting contentions of planned connivance by Italian
agents in Smyrna in the disorders that accompanied the Greek landings on May
15, 1919. As to the fire itself, and other matters discussed herein, she
discovered only supporting evidence in the governmental archives of Great
Britain, Italy, and Greece.
A
pertinent and valuable scholarly collection, Deltio Kentrou Mikrasiatikon
Spoudon (Bulletin of the Center for Asia Minor Studies), vol. 4, a special
issue on the Asia Minor catastrophe (ed. Paschalis Kitromilides, Athens,
1983), offers the fruits of considerable new research on the Greeks of the
Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The articles
appear in English, French, or Greek, and summaries in French or English are
provided for articles published in Greek. Among the more relevant articles is
one by A. J. Panayotopoulos, in English, based on work for a doctoral
dissertation, which describes in considerable detail, as the title indicates,
"The Economic Activities of the Anatolian Greeks from the Mid-19th to the
Early 20th Centuries," including of course those of the Smyrna region. A
fascinating study, "The Crypto-Christians of the Pontus" by Antony
Bryer, also in English, includes numerous references to works bearing on the
subject of pressures exerted in the Ottoman Empire for conversion to Islam,
demographic charts, and British and French documents on the subject of the
title. Thanos Veremis has presented "Two Letters—Memoranda from E.
Venizelos to Winston Churchill" (the letters appear in their original
English) with reference, by Venizelos, to the severity with which the Allies
were treating Greece's war debt as contrasted to the indulgence shown to
Turkey and Bulgaria, their wartime enemies. A summary, in French, of Yannis
Mourelos' paper concerning the Franco-Turkish accord of 1921 reinforces my
sense of the serious consequences of this alliance on the fate of the Asia
Minor Greeks. An article by Victoria Solomonides derived from research in
preparation for her doctoral dissertation centers on an annotated report
from Chrysostomos Hajistavrou, the Metropolitan of Ephesus, to the Greek
Patriarchate in early October 1922 which, as indicated by the summary in
English, includes substantial detail on the last days of Smyrna, the fate of
the Christian communities, the arrival of refugees in Greece, and measures
taken for their relief. Included in the volume is my own article, "George
Horton and Mark L. Bristol, Opposing Forces in U.S. Foreign Policy
1919-1923."
When
I was gathering materials for this book, the population figures for minorities
in the late Ottoman Empire were available only from minority sources; they
were primarily church and mission figures. More recently a number of Turkish
and American scholars acceptable to the Turkish government have published
works based on Ottoman census figures. These demographic studies show the
number of Greeks and Armenians to have been so markedly low—especially
during periods of unrest—in contrast to the figures available earlier from
Greek and Armenian sources, that demographics has become an issue of
considerable importance in the current, politically heated climate. Because
the Turkish archives are open only to scholars selected in advance by the
Turkish government, it bears noting that the figures cannot be verified by
others at this writing.
The
latest Bulletin (volume 5,1984-85) of the Center for Asia Minor Studies
includes a study by Paschalis Kitromilides and Alexis Alexandris titled
"Ethnic Survival, Nationalism and Forced Migration; the Historical
Demography of the Greek Community of Asia Minor at the Close of the Ottoman
Era." The paper presents previously unpublished materials from the Greek
Foreign Ministry Historical Archives (AYE) and bibliographic references to
important works by Turkish, Greek, and other scholars on the sensitive issues
of demographics and on linguistic and migratory patterns—primarily of Asia
Minor Greeks during the late Ottoman period. From the evidence presented in
this important article emerges a new more precise and reliable picture of
population magnitudes in Asia Minor in the early twentieth century, as well as
a clearer sense of the human losses involved in the protracted tragedy of the
period 1912-22.
In
"Shared Illusions: Greek-Armenian Cooperation in
Evidence
both published and unpublished, discovered by Professor Vahakn Dadrian of the
State University of New York at Geneseo, concerns two separate points: the
British attitude towards Admiral Bristol and some Turkish attitudes on the
burning of Smyrna and destruction of other towns during the Armenian
deportations. Comments of ranking British officials in charge of the Eastern
Department of the Foreign Office indicate the naiveté and ignorance of Mark
Bristol, characterized as a man "carefully spoon fed by the Turks."
The characterization applies as well to Mrs. Bristol and Bristol's
intelligence officer Lt. A. S. Merrill, who is quoted liberally in my text.
Further, in his report of October 18, 1919, Admiral Richard Webb told Lord
Curzon, the British secretary of state, that "very few of them [the
Americans] have any previous knowledge of the Near East, the Committee of
Union and Progress, or of the political history of the past ten years. . . .
[They are] ready to rise to such catchwords as independence and
self-determination." These references, which I have summarized from
Dadrian's notes, support the portrait I have drawn of Admiral Bristol, which I
based on interviews with American sailors and others, and for the most part on
the admiral's own words. Dadrian's materials are from the Foreign Office
Archives in the Public Records Office,
Dadrian's
fluency in Turkish led him to two books published in Turkey that expose the
authors' views on the burning of Smyrna. One, published in 1953 and titled Maresal
Fevzi Cakmak is by Siueeyman Kuelce. In volume 1 (p. 236), the author
implicitly concedes that General Nourredin, commander of the army which took
over Smyrna on September 9, 1922, was responsible for the massacre and the
fire. Kuelce blames the general for his "myopic" outlook. His view
is supported by Falih Rifki Atay, author of Cankaya. Atatuerkuen Dogumundan
Qeluemuene Kadar (Chankaya. From Ataturk's Birth up to his Death),
Why
were we burning Izmir? [Izmiri nicin
yakiyorduk?] Were we afraid that we would not be delivering ourselves
from the [sway] of the minorities in case the mansions, hotels and cafes were
left to remain? Driven by the same fear we put to the torch all the
inhabitable quarters and neighborhoods of the Anatolian cities and towns
during the World War I Armenian deportations.
(p. 323)
Atay
also emphasizes the bigotry and "penchant for arrogance and cruelty"
of Army Commander Noureddin on whom he blames the burning of Smyrna (an act
Kemal was evidently unable or unwilling to prevent). Noureddin's actions,
according to Atay, were "undoubtedly . . . reinforced by ... the ruins of
Turkish villages which the Greeks since their retreat from Afyon had been
reducing to ashes" (p. 325).
There
is a school of thought that believes one must balance one set of atrocities
against another by giving "equal time" or equal emphasis, and one
critic reprimanded me for failing to do this. I have taken American Consul
George Horton's view of the atrocities committed by Greek troops as they fled
towards Smyrna, rather than Arnold J. Toynbee's. The latter did an about-face
in The Western Question, perhaps because he had expected far better
of Greeks than Turks (an elitist view to be sure), but without doubt because
he equated all violence, denying qualitative differences in motive. This
does not coincide with my conviction that motives and circumstances must be
weighed. Consul Horton, in his final report to the secretary of state on the
burning of Smyrna, dated September 26,1922 (which reached me too late for
inclusion in the original text of this book), wrote: "I see a difference
between the excesses of a furious and betrayed army, retreating through a
country which it had held for several years, and without its officers, and the
conduct of the victorious Turkish army which, instead of protecting the
helpless people which it had in its power, deliberately set about massacring
and outraging it" (National Archives 767.68/476).
Toynbee's
theory of history, which does not always accommodate particulars, and his
infusion of Christian ethics in areas where these do not suit drove him to
contradict himself more than once on the question of the Armenian
"exterminations." Missing from my text are his later words on the
subject. In Acquaintances (Oxford University Press, 1967) he unequivocally
terms the Ottoman treatment of the Armenians in 1915-16 a genocide (240).
After
the original edition of this book was published, numbers of Greek escapees
approached me, asking that I record their experiences. I did not take up these
offers once I had established that the subjects had no new evidence to offer.
I did make note of the testimony of Nicolas Tsamapoulos of Astoria, New York,
who showed me the words that Vice
Consul Maynard Barnes, to whom he had turned for assistance during the
days when Smyrna was smouldering, had angrily scrawled across his Certificate
of Naturalization: "Resided in country of birth for four
years—Citizenship lost." (This, while French officials were handing out
safe-conduct passes to anyone who could speak, even haltingly, in French.) Such
a specific example of Barnes's needlessly harsh behavior after Consul
Horton's departure, confirms the impression of some of the American seamen
that Barnes was excessively anxious to follow Admiral Bristol's policy of
giving no aid and comfort to the minorities.
More
recently a mutual friend arranged for me to interview Nino Russo of Freeport,
Long Island; I was happy to obtain an Italian view. A youthful eighty years
old when I spoke with him, Russo had been ship's engineer on the Italian
battleship Vittore Imanuele, which had sailed into Smyrna harbor just
as the fires were beginning to break out at various points in the city. Russo
spoke with the same intense feeling as had most of the American seamen I
interviewed. The heat at one point was so strong, he confirmed, that even
though his large ship stood at considerable distance from the shore, it had to
move back. The Italians had come in to pick up their own nationals but they
sent out twenty lifeboats and picked up anyone within range without asking who
was or was not Italian. "There were so many bodies in the water you
couldn't count. Everybody, ... all the big-shots, the Captain, all those
people going back and forth to shore, they knew and they reported that the
Turks were burning
It
has recently come to my attention that Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) himself
acknowledged the attempted extermination of Armenians conducted in 1915-16
and summarized in chapter 2 as a part of the historical background of events
leading to the sack and burning of Smyrna. In an interview with Swiss
journalist Emil Hildebrand published in the Los Angeles Examiner of August
1,1926, Kemal referred to political antagonists as "These left-overs from
the former Young Turkey [sic] Party, who should have been made to
account for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were
ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred."
Paradoxically, while continuing to revere Kemal as founder of the Turkish
Republic and their foremost national hero, successive Turkish governments,
including the one currently in power, also continue to revere Talaat, the
leader of the Young Turk party and architect of the Armenian genocide. For all
practical purposes Kemal himself was in charge during the postwar period that
constitutes the primary focus of this book.
Over
the past two decades there has been a spate of books in English on the Near or
Middle East, many of them enlightening. Revisionism on certain aspects of
Turkish history between 1908-23 is another matter. While this is not the place
for an extended discussion, mention is necessary because the Turkish
government appears to be promoting a cottage industry of works for foreign
consumption which the proliferation of Turkish studies in the United States
and abroad is in danger of legitimizing, notably among some scholars whose
work, for one reason or another, depends on maintaining the goodwill of
Turkish officialdom. I have described in my text earlier attempts to
manipulate the recording of events for political purposes. (In works published
earlier I have devoted somewhat more detail to historical revisionism of
events covered in this book. See the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition titled The
Smyrna Affair, pp. 223-25, and the last four pages of my article in Commentary,
"The Unremembered Genocide," September 1966, vol. 42, no. 3, pp.
55-61.) At this
writing the Turkish government is enlisting academic support here and abroad
in a massive campaign to change the historical record for the entire period
1915-23. Terrence Des Pres presents an analysis of precisely this kind of
politically motivated scholarship in the United States in his article "On
Governing Narratives: The Turkish-Armenian Case," The Yale Review 75
(1986): 517-31.
One
result of this onslaught has been to divert the energies of a number of
scholars. In 1986 Dadrian published "The Naim-Andonian Documents of the
World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians and the Anatomy of a
Genocide," International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (August
1986): pp. 311-60, confirming
the authenticity of Talaat's orders, some of which I have quoted in chapter 2.
Turkkaya Ataov of Ankara University declared the Talaat documents to be
forgeries, and a campaign is under way to convince Jewish scholars that there
is no relationship between the Armenian and Jewish exterminations.
Countering this allegation as well, Dadrian published "The Role of
Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians," Holocaust
and Genocide Studies 1 (1986): 169-92. K. B. Bardakjian of the University
of Michigan has written Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Zoryan
Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985), confirming
the authenticity of the Hitler quotation I have used at the end of this book.
Richard Hovannisian of the University of California at Los Angeles has on more
than one occasion interrupted his magnum opus, a three-volume history of the
postwar Armenian Republic, to document the nature of the denial
itself—"The Critic's View: Beyond Revisionism," International
Journal of Middle East Studies 9 (August 1978): 311-59, and "Genocide
and Denial: The Armenian Case," in Towards the Understanding and
Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference, ed.
Israel W. Charney (Westview Press, Boulder and London, 1984). This article was
originally presented at the 1982 International Conference on the Holocaust
and Genocide held in Tel Aviv. A compilation of the Armenian papers read at
the Tel Aviv conference appears in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, ed.
Richard G. Hovannisian (Transaction, Inc.: New Brunswick, N.J., 1986).
Israel
W. Charny, who was co-director and prime organizer of the conference, has
given an account of Turkish pressures exerted on conference leaders and the
State of Israel (Israel withdrew sponsorship as a result) because of the
inclusion of Armenians. Titled "The Turks, Armenians and Jews," his
account appears at the end of Book One: The Conference Program and Crisis, published
by the Institute of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide
(Tel Aviv, 1983).
Finally,
it is interesting to note the increased blatancy of the historical distortion
in the entry on Smyrna in the latest (15th) edition of the Encyclopedia
Brittanica published in 1974. It reads: "In May 1919, Izmir was
occupied by Greek forces. Heavily damaged in the fighting, it was recaptured
by Turkish forces in September 1922." Authors of entries are not easy to
locate in this new Encyclopedia Brittanica, but persistence led me to
Ahmet Temir, Director of the Turkish Cultural Center, Ankara, and Professor
Sirri Erinc of the University of Istanbul, who was a co-author of the text in
the 14th edition quoted earlier in this introduction.
A
lack of acquaintance with the most reliable secondary sources and ways and
means of proceeding to find them, led me at the outset to ask the advice of
knowledgeable and respected experts (ultimately I approached many more, in a
widening circle). I am especially grateful to the late Professor Basil Rauch
of Barnard College, noted specialist in American history, and the late Thomas
Peardon, Dean of the Faculty at Barnard and Professor of Political Science,
without whose encouragement I might not have had the courage to proceed. My
thanks, as well, to two colleagues who were the first to help guide my reading
of the period directly pertinent to my project: Professor Rene Albrecht-Carrie
of Barnard and Columbia and Professor Harry Psomiades now of Queens College.
Dr. Stanley Kerr, who died several years ago, was busy with research for his
book The Lions of Marash (State University of New York Press, 1973)
while I was pursuing documents in the archives. I remember with pleasure our
occasional meetings in the course of which we would exchange information. It
was a decidely unbalanced exchange; Dr. Kerr had been in Marash as a young
Near East Relief director during the postwar French occupation of the area,
and tales of his experiences were exciting as well as informative. Professor
James Gidney (now Emeritus) of Kent State University and author of A
Mandate for Armenia (Kent State University Press, 1967) has long been
helpful and encouraging. I of course am indebted now to the scholars who have
thoughtfully helped keep me abreast of developments since the original
publication of this book, among them Professor Vahakn Dadrian of the State
University of New York at Geneseo; Professor J. K. Hassiotis of the University
of Salonika; Dr. Paschalis Kitromilides of the Institute for Asia Minor
Studies in Athens; Dr. Gerard Libaridian of the Zoryan Institute in Cambridge,
Massachusetts; and Professor Richard Hovannisian of the University of
California at Los Angeles. I owe a great deal to Professor Hovannisian, on
whose expertise I have drawn more than once, and I am profoundly grateful to
him for sending me a considerable list of relatively minor but inexcusable
errors on the background material I had presented, with corrections. The
errors had gone into the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition of this book, and
were corrected in the British edition, as they are of course in this present
one, which reprints the Faber and Faber text. Interpretations and any
remaining errors or omissions are of course all mine.
In
obtaining the addresses of the American sailors from the Bureau of Naval
Personnel, I am indebted to the good offices of my late congressman, Bill
Ryan, the likes of whom we see all too seldom in our legislative halls. And I
should here like to acknowledge the letters I have received over the years
from scores of readers who were either themselves eyewitnesses or closely
related to those who were, to the burning of
Above
all I am profoundly grateful to those eyewitnesses who, either as survivors or
as retired members of the United States Navy, offered me their memories,
however painful, and their letters, diaries, and news clippings, when these
were available. Without their help this account would obviously have been
impossible. I should like to record here, as well, my debts to those entrusted
with the papers deposited in the Manuscript Division of the Library of
Congress, the Naval Records Collection and the files of the Department of
State at the National Archives. In all cases their assistance was gracious,
efficient, and immeasurably helpful. I am grateful, too, to the staffs of the
Historical Reference Library of the YMCA in New York City and the Houghton
Library of Harvard University. My very special thanks go to Miss Nancy
Horton for so kindly making her father's papers available to me.
To
my present editor, John Hubbell, my warm appreciation for his patience and
wise counsel. And indeed to the
Marjorie
Housepian Dobkin, Barnard College, Columbia University, N.Y., NY., USA
………………………………………………………………………………………………
………………………………………………………………………………………………
FINAL
CHAPTER
CHAPTER
XXI
In
the size of the lie, there is always contained a certain factor of
credibility, since the great masses of the people will more easily fall victim
to a great lie than to a small one.
ADOLF
HITLER
Mein
Kampf
For
several years after the Smyrna debacle, American interests in Turkey conducted
an intensive campaign to revise public opinion at home. This was no small
task, for in the course of massive fund appeals the American Protestant
leadership had created a certain amount of antipathy toward Turkey and
sympathy for her minorities. Yet the Lausanne Treaty constituted a victory
for Turkey on the question of the Christian population and a triumph of
political and economic considerations for the West. Not the least of these was
the matter of oil. According to Standard Oil Company historians, “there
were many issues of importance at Lausanne but oil usurped the center of the
stage”.
In
varying degrees every Western nation involved had to defend this order of
priorities. But the greater the discrepancy between a nation's professed and
actual motives, the greater its need to justify its policies. Political
scientists might wave “morality” aside as irrelevant to the national
interest. American historians might proclaim the triumph of American
diplomacy; but spokesmen for America had been denouncing the ignominious
motives of her rivals too loudly and for too long to let the nature of her
triumph speak for itself. In 1924 the Near East desk at the State Department
was still busily enlisting co-operative writers to its cause.
Although
not technically a party to the treaty, the United States had sent three
“observers” to Lausanne: Admiral Mark L. Bristol, Joseph C. Grew (he was
later to be U.S. Ambassador to Japan until the attack on Pearl Harbor), and
Richard Washburn Child, a magazine writer turned diplomat who, according to
Harold Nicolson, was “typically American” in his conviction “that the
whole Lausanne Conference was a plot on the part of the old diplomacy to
deprive American company promoters of oil concessions”. Child injected his
advocacy of the “open door” into the proceedings with monotonous
regularity. On one occasion, after an eloquent discourse of Curzon's,
Child's remarks were so grossly irrelevant, as to cause the more seasoned
diplomats to gape at each other, Nicolson records, “in bewildered
embarrassment”. With single-minded insight, Child attributed their
reaction to guilt: “I could see that my statement had given discouragement
and doubt to several secret plans around the Conference table.”
The
United States had publicly committed itself to upholding the Capitulations -
in order to protect its schools, religious institutions, and businessmen in
Turkey - and to securing measures for the protection of minorities left in
Constantinople. On these issues Ismet Pasha, once again his country's
delegate, showed that he was prepared to conduct a siege that would outlast
the limited patience of Western diplomats. Even Curzon's rapier-like wit was
blunted, on occasion, against Ismet Pasha's impenetrable stubbornness on the
question of Turkish sovereignty. But the British statesman won points for
obstinacy too: When the first session broke up,
On
7 April 1923, a few days before the conference was to resume, Angora dropped a
bombshell with the announcement that it had granted Admiral Chester his
coveted concessions. There was a shrill outcry from France, who for all her
groundwork now found herself, along with Italy and Russia, with nothing much
to show. Chester's exploitation rights covered the same area promised to
France in Franklin-Bouillon's 1921 negotiations with Kemal. The nod to Chester
was a transparent Turkish move to soften the United States position on the
Capitulations, but the Department of State, oddly enough, was not especially
pleased about Chester's triumph. The British, whose Turkish Petroleum
Company's claims in Mosul were now ostensibly threatened, appeared singularly
unconcerned.
While
upholding the “open door” (translated “equal rights to all comers”)
and professing to support all American claims, including Chester's, the State
Department was under the distinct impression that Chester had no chance at
all. Behind the scenes, Secretary
of State Hughes (a former Standard Oil Company executive who would return to
his job after serving his country) had been working hard on behalf of the firm
for several years. By the autumn of 1922 the British had begun to
perceive that “it was better to give the Americans a share in the Turkish
Petroleum Company than to run the risk of letting them loose to compete for
concessions....”
In
order to utilize State Department support for penetration into Mosul without
risking criticism from rival companies, Standard Oil had reluctantly combined
forces with such select American firms as Sinclair, Texas, and Gulf.
“I believe it will be necessary to take some other interest with us, and a
part of whom, at least, should be outside the subsidiaries,” wrote
Standard Oil director Sadler to Standard Oil president Teagle in September
1921. “I also think we should select the associates carefully and keep the
list as small as possible.” Under the circumstances none of the principals
had to be concerned that such a joint corporate venture was in violation of
the antitrust laws or that the “open door” was as tightly closed as they
could wish.
Mesopotamia's
oil-rich lands were all this time under British military occupation. In a
canny move, the British had installed Feisal as ruler of the area in August
1921, when the French ousted him from Syria. With British encouragement,
Feisal was now claiming this land - Iraq - as independent of Turkey. Curzon
won another round at Lausanne when Turkey agreed to submit the dispute to the
League of Nations.
It
quickly became obvious that, minus Mosul, Chester's concessions would be as
desirable as the turkey's neck; without the oil, and with the working
population gone, a railroad network into the interior of Turkey was a far less
appetizing investment. Searching avidly for capital, Chester was soon driven
outside the United States. At this point the State Department, which had
remained cool all along, announced sanctimoniously that it could no longer
support him, since his chief backers were British. Chester's prospects thereafter
went downhill. In time his more respectable backers split and his tactics
assumed a desperate air; unsavoury promoters reared their heads, known
gamblers came into the picture, there was at least one attempt at blackmail,
and one of his agents was arrested in Anatolia as a British spy. In December
1923 Angora announced that because Chester had not exercised his option, his
grant was cancelled by default.
Standard
Oil and its invited participants, now allied with
To
State Department contentions that the Iraqi scheme was not in violation of the
“open door”, Gulbenkian snorted “eye-wash”. At the behest of American
representatives, all references to oil claims were deleted from the final
draft of the Lausanne Treaty.
In
order to re-establish formal relations with Turkey, the State Department had
to sell the treaty to Congress; but although inroads had been made on public
opinion, a segment of the public was putting up strong resistance to what it
considered a sellout of the Christian minorities. Led by some eminent
educators, Wilsonian diplomats, leaders of the Episcopal Church (it happened
to have no missions in Turkey), and several southern and mid-western
legislators - the Bible Belt having been so thoroughly sold on Armenians as
Christian martyrs that it was not buying any other view - this faction also
included relief workers, teachers, and virtually the entire staff of the
American Collegiate Institute. At least one missionary had been fired. On his
return from Smyrna, a week before the fire, S. Ralph Harlow of the
International College faculty had given an interview to the New York Times in
which he denounced American policy and predicted that it would lead to
disaster for the minorities in Turkey. He continued to speak out after the
Smyrna debacle. “They told me to shut up,” he said later. “MacLachlan
and Reed demanded my resignation and said that I «endangered the College». I
resigned. I have been made to feel that I ought to keep still, but justice
seemed to me greater than buildings and institutions.” In a more recent
interview, Dr. Harlow - now Professor Emeritus of Religion, Smith College -
remembered this experience as the most disillusioning of his life. “The
missionaries were a disgrace,” he said.
Prominent
leaders of the Near East Relief and the Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions took a very different view of the treaty. “We believe in America
for the Americans, why not Turkey for the Turks?” George A. Plimpton (one of
the charter members of the Armenian Atrocities Committee and later a director
of the Near East Relief) asked rhetorically in 1923, after expressing his
admiration to Turkey for trouncing the Greeks and dictating terms to the
Allies. Plimpton expressed his concern that the loss of the Greeks (and
presumably of the unmentioned Armenians) had “cost great suffering and
involved great financial sacrifice to Turkey [in the sense that she had lost
her merchants and major taxpayers]. Whether it was right or wrong is not for
us to decide,” added this trustee of Union Theological Seminary.
Having
publicized these sentiments in a letter to the New York Times, Plimpton
also printed them in The Treaty With Turkey, an instructive
compilation of “statements, resolutions, and reports in favour of the
ratification of the Lausanne Treaty”, brought out jointly by some
significantly interested individuals, the foremost being members of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the United States
Chamber of Commerce. The burden of their combined effort was to praise Turkey,
to dismiss and at the same time justify its actions against the minorities,
and to demonstrate that if the Turks were in any way antagonized - as by
rejection of the treaty - both American business and American philanthropy
would suffer.
Such
luminaries as Secretary Hughes, Herbert Hoover, Admiral Bristol, and Richard
Washburn Child contributed to the volume. Playing to the current panic over an
“international communist conspiracy”, Hughes declared that “Turkey is
not endeavoring to undermine our institutions, to penetrate our labor
organizations by pernicious propaganda, and to foment disorder and
conspiracies against our domestic peace in the interest of a world
revolution.” Secretary Barton of the Board of Missions, on the other hand,
feared that Turkey might go communist. He argued that American schools in
Turkey were now more necessary than ever, in order to make the Turks “look
westward” rather than north. Bristol wrote that rejection of the treaty
would “incur the ill will of Turkish officials and expose American
institutions to unfavorable treatment”. Trade concessions, according to
Herbert Hoover, would not be granted to U.S. nationals unless Congress signed
the treaty. Child
compared Kemal's revolution to George Washington's.
Missionary
arguments were no less pointed. “Millions of dollars [in philanthropic
investment] will be endangered, if not sacrificed, if the treaty is
rejected,” wrote a representative of the National Council of Congregational
Churches. Missionary doctors were being denied permission to practice in
Turkey, he acknowledged, but “this permission will be granted as soon as the
treaty is ratified”. Missionary leaders were gratified to note that
henceforth their clients would be exclusively Moslem. There was no need to
feel concerned about the Christians: “Every adult in Turkey is free to
worship as he chooses -the Mohammedans in their mosques, the Christians, where
there are any, in their churches.” As far as medical services were
concerned, a missionary doctor observed that “There are no Christian
patients applying. The Turks are beginning to realize that we are in Turkey
primarily to serve the people.” Unless the treaty was ratified this
incipient good will would be jeopardized.
Choosing
to overlook the fact that it was the missionary leadership that had
prevented President Wilson from declaring war on Turkey in 1917, the various
writers harped on his failure as a lost chance: “The right time to express
indignation at barbarities was in 1917 when we were at war with Turkey's
associates. President Wilson restrained Congress from declaring war, and we
thereby lost our chance to influence the peace settlement in our own right.”
According to the General Secretary of the YMCA, excesses of the Turks had been
“grossly exaggerated”. “To try to insert into the treaty a clause
regarding the present minorities in Turkey would be very similar to foreign
powers having insisted after our revolution on inserting a clause to the
effect that we protect the American Indians living in the thirteen
colonies,” he wrote, not doubting for a moment that such an idea was
preposterous. Admiral Bristol, on the other hand, deemed it essential to have
a clause “to protect corporations and individuals from the retroactive
application of new and possibly excessive taxes”.
After
a time the arguments became not only strained but absent-minded. All the fuss
over Armenians was nonsense, one writer declared, because “it is a fact that
there were no wholesale massacres against Armenians until they lent themselves
to Russia's schemes.” But another writer argued that the Allies owed no debt
to the Armenians because “military services which were alleged as a ground
of obligation toward the Turkish Armenians were performed almost entirely by
the Armenians of Russia.” The volume ended on a reassuring note: “It's
no use to talk of atrocities; when it comes to atrocities all these people are
all the same.” Historian Edward Mead Earle went one step further by
surveying how dreadfully everyone had behaved toward everyone else throughout
history.
This
onslaught (representing newspapers and magazines ranging from
Until
1927, when diplomatic relations with Turkey were fully restored, a flood of
articles and books continued to review the Smyrna catastrophe. “The
destruction of Smyrna by fire was the work of the Greeks,” wrote a Mr.
Abdullah Hamdi in Current History. Hamdi, a resident of New York, cited
a Turkish newspaper as his source of information. George
Horton presented his account in considerable detail, and at some cost to his
career, in The Blight of Asia. “The torch was applied to that
ill-fated city and it was all systematically burned by the soldiers of Mustafa
Kemal.” Horton concluded, adding that the Allied and American warships
“impotently watching” the Miltonic scene provided “the saddest and most
significant feature of the whole picture”. In many quarters the book was
considered “unbecoming”.
No
one publication raised quite as much concern at the State Department as Edward
Hale Bierstadt's The Great Betrayal. The author (he had been executive
secretary of the emergency committee that pushed a special refugee bill
through Congress after the fire) charged that the State Department's policy of
“American economic imperialism” and Bristol's excessively restrictive
orders had contributed to the Smyrna disaster. Even before its publication,
in 1924, installments of Bierstadt's book appearing in The Christian Herald
provoked such a blast of angry letters to the Near East desk that Allen
Dulles, unable to officially refute the charges head-on, was driven to seek
personal testimonials. One zealous volunteer, a Mr. William T. Ellis, who
identified himself as “a patriot and writer for The Christian Herald”, had
in fact to be restrained. “If it happened that Mr. Bierstadt's charges
against the United States were true,” Ellis had written in the draft of a
rebuttal submitted to Dulles for approval, “we merit straightway the fate of
Sodom and Gomorrah”. Dulles thought Ellis should alter his tone and
suggested some changes in phraseology, “so that it won't appear that
American officials dumped the refugees on Greek territory”.
Dulles
leaned more heavily on the word of some of the relief officials present at the
Smyrna proceedings. He urged them to write letters to editors, taking issue
with Bierstadt's book. Mark Premiss, among others, was exceedingly helpful,
but the Department's most valuable witness turned out to be Asa Jennings.
Jennings
had already taken a large step forward in the international world when, on
Admiral Bristol's recommendation, he was appointed a member of the
International Commission on the exchange of Greek and Turkish prisoners.
After Bierstadt's book was published, Jennings wrote the Secretary of State
defending Bristol's “spirit of swift succor” at Smyrna and told the
Department that it could make any use it wanted of his letter. A copy was
promptly exclosed in the Department's reply to each disgruntled citizen who
had written in.
In
the course of time, and again at Bristol's suggestion, Jennings returned to
Smyrna in charge of YMCA clubs - which he wanted to rename “Turkish-American
clubs” since the word “Christian” had such offensive overtones. When the
YMCA demurred, Jennings founded a new organization devoted to social service:
“The American Friends of Turkey”, financed by a Cincinnati clothing
manufacturer known as Arthur “Golden Rule” Nash. During frequent lecture
trips in the United States Jennings modestly dismissed his naval experience,
and in subsequent presentations (in one instance by the aforementioned
William Ellis) that story underwent a decided shift in tone. The Turks were
scarcely mentioned, the Greek government had behaved rather cravenly about its
ships; there had been suffering, yes, but “c 'est la guerre".
The
epilogue of the Smyrna drama was played out in London at the High Court of
Justice, during the first weeks of December 1924. The American Tobacco Company
was bringing suit against the Guardian Assurance Company, Ltd. Maintaining
that the fire was a result of “hostile and warlike operations”, the
insurance company had invoked its exemption clause and refused to pay. The
claim was for over $600,000, and it was understood that the outcome of the
trial would govern other claims totaling $100,000,000.
A
cast of familiar characters paraded to the witness stand before Mr. Justice
Rowlatt. Spunky little Major Cherefeddin Bey described how he had been struck
with a hand grenade as he led his cavalry regiment down the quay on 9
September two years before, but the Armenian culprit in his original story had
now become “a uniformed, armed Greek soldier who threw the bomb”. Beyond
this incident the Major had seen no disorder at Smyrna because, he said,
“nothing took place”.
A
Colonel Mouharren Bey admitted that feeling ran high against the Armenians
because “we used to read reports in our newspapers of their behaviour, which
led us to believe they were not friendly to us”. Yes, the army had
distributed proclamations referring to “the injustice and cowardice of the
Greeks, who nevertheless proved to be the most cruel enemy unlike any nation
in the history of the human race”, but the Colonel swore that his troops
were well disciplined and denied that his patrols had participated in any
looting, rape or murder. “The patrols would never do such a thing”, he
said.
The
Colonel was recalled to the stand after a witness for the plaintiff
unwittingly revealed that a cordon of Turkish soldiers had held the victims in
the fire zone. “Did you want to prevent the people going anywhere?” asked
Mr. A. T. Miller, representing the Guardian Assurance Company.
“Yes, we prevent them.”
“Going
where?”
“We
prevent them to be not escape from there only to stay there.” Mr. Justice
Rowlatt thought this wasn't much of a translation.
Miller
tried again with another interpreter. “Why did you have the cordon on the
quay? Did you want them burnt?”
“No,
only to keep them by the boats.”
During
his cross-examination of Mr. Chester Griswold (of Griswold and Brunswick, fig
merchants), Mr. Miller again confirmed the presence of Turkish cordons around
the city.
Did
Mr. Griswold think it right that the people should thus be prevented from
escaping the fire?
Mr.
Griswold thought it was done for their own good. The roads leading from town
were in bad neighbourhoods: “A good many bad characters live around
there,” he said.
Did
Mr. Griswold mean to say that the cordon was placed there by the Turks “to
prevent the people from falling into bad hands?”
“I
presume that,” said Mr. Griswold.
Griswold
testified to having carried an American flag on his car, and to having placed
American sailor guards at the bakeries - not to protect the bakers, who were
Greek, but simply to keep them from selling bread.
He had driven around town a good deal before and after the fire, in his
capacity as secretary of the relief committee. The town was quiet and he had
seen no violence.
Under
cross-examination Griswold admitted that his Turkish business partner was the
mayor of Smyrna and that he was also a friend and associate of a man named
Archbell, a director of the American Tobacco Company - the plaintiff in the
case.
Mr.
Rene Guichet, chief engineer of the French railway company, with offices at
the edge of the Armenian quarter, had seen nothing unusual before the fire
except a little pillaging and heard nothing except a few “joy firings”;
but he had to concede that there was essentially little difference in the
sound of a gun being fired in joy or in anger. The Armenian population had not
been molested so far as he knew because they were at first “closed in”,
and later “they had left”. Again, he was forced to admit that it was not
easy to tell the difference between people shut indoors and people absent, but
he had an intuitive feeling of the way it had been.
Witnesses
of every nationality, including an English business associate of the
enterprising Mr. Archbell (this one in the garage and agricultural machinery
business) supported the view that a single fire had spread accidentally,
through the force of the wind.
Mr.
Justice Rowlatt did not feel enlightened when the plaintiffs had rested their
case. “This is one of the vaguest cases I've ever tried,” he
complained.
“I’
m afraid it is very difficult, my lord,” Miller conceded.
“If
this was a more civilized city,” mused the Judge, “one very probable
explanation would be that somebody who was looting had got drunk. But as it is
a semi-barbarous place the question of drink is not mentioned in the case.”
The
haze began to clear as the defendant's witnesses took the stand. British naval
officers offered their logs in evidence that while the wind was pleasantly
brisk it was by no means stiff enough to fan the flames from the Collegiate
Institute clear to the quay. Nurse Mabel Kalfa, the Reverend Charles Dobson,
Major Maxwell of the Royal Marines, Sir Harry Lamb, members of the Smyrna fire
department, and others were explicit about the origin and spreading of the
flames and about the increase in violence as the days went on. A number of
victims described their experiences. Among these was a lady who had been
raped, whose daughter had been assaulted, and whose father had been slain by
Turkish soldiers. In a dramatic cross-examination Mr. Wright, representing the
plaintiff, implied that she was masquerading under a false name, but was
unable to prove his Allegation. He had no better luck in trying to shake the
firemen's stories. “It must have struck you as a remarkable thing that the
Turks were saying they were allowed to burn down Smyrna,” he told fireman
Katzaros.
“Why
should it appear remarkable when I saw it myself?” “Did you mention it to
your fellow workmen at the fire brigade afterwards ?”
“If
I mentioned that,” said Katzaros, “they would have hanged me by the
tongue.”
During
his summation Wright noted severely, “This is a charge against a nation,”
but he drew signs of amusement in the courtroom when he insisted that the
Turks had “made every attempt to maintain order”. By now thoroughly
frustrated, the counsel for the plaintiff asked the Judge to admonish the
opposition: “With great respect, my lord, the case here is serious, the
evidence is flimsy, and it is not made the less flimsy by my learned friend
ridiculing what I am saying!”
“No,
no,” said the Judge. “But I do not know that the other side, who will not
be able to reply, are called upon not to laugh at what you said.”
On
Friday, 19 December, Mr. Justice Rowlatt delivered a considered judgment in
favour of the defendant insurance company. The Judge, according to the London
Times, entertained no doubt about the occurrences.
Neither
the trial nor the verdict made much of an impact on the historical record,
even in England. Not long afterwards a British publisher informed George
Horton that The Blight of Asia could not be published there because
“the British public was now so interested in the Mosul oil interests that
they did not wish anything circulated that might offend the Turks”. In a
letter to Horton, Venizelos confirmed this opposition as “decisive”.
Already
the story of the Smyrna tragedy and its antecedents was being subjected to
considerable revision. Among those influential in altering the historical
verdict were the missionaries who had discredited their own eyewitness
testimonies, and Arnold Toynbee, who after Lord Bryce's death in 1922 remained
the foremost living authority on the question of Turkish minorities. After
completing his editorship of Bryce's Blue Book on the treatment of Armenians,
Toynbee had published a number of impassioned summaries to support his plea
that the world remember these “unprecedented crimes” after the war and
insure against their recurrence. Then, in 1921, he had briefly covered the
Greco-Turkish war as a reporter for the then pro-Greek Manchester Guardian.
Stationed with the Turkish Red Crescent he beheld Turks as the victims of
violence inflicted by Greeks. He later referred to this experience as a
turning point in his historical attitude. (Arnold Toynbee to his son, Philip,
in A Dialogue Across a Generation: “It was quite an influential thing
in my life, seeing that war. I always try to see things from the unpopular
point of view, the point of view that isn't represented. I think that's a very
strong urge in me.” Philip Toynbee: “Of course, it has been said that
there's a certain perversity in this, and that in your anxiety to be fair you
sometimes exaggerate the merits of the unpopular case.” Arnold Toynbee:
“I'm sure I do. Leaning over backwards.”)
The
popular point of view Toynbee had shared with American missionaries and
British Liberals, had been replete with Christian condescension frequently
bolstered by invective. (“I'd had the traditional sort of Gladstonian
idea”, Toynbee has said, “that the Turks were just a scandal which ought
to be liquidated.”) Now, in concluding that he had sinned, Toynbee in
effect dismissed the content along with the tone of his treatises against the
Turks. In the bibliography of his next book - The Western Question in
Greece and Turkey - he cited his previous writing as an example of the
sort of prejudice for which he would henceforth atone.
By
now convinced of the positive value of suffering and the negative nature of
anger (“Anger I do feel is a sin - we're all angry with somebody sometimes,
and when I find it in myself I am horrified ...”) Toynbee proceeded to
equate all forms of violence; specifically all manifestations of violence in
Turkey as identical impulses in the course of “westernization”. Despite
his protest, in an article in the July 1923 issue of Current History, that
he still believed in the truth of the evidence presented in the Blue Book, he
went on to say that “Equally dark deeds have been inflicted by Greek
soldiers .. during the war for Greek independence.” This was the same man
who had painstakingly refuted Turkish attempts to draw such a parallel.
Since the Turkish Armenians were offering the Turks no provocation whatever,
“the Turkish contentions fail from first to last”, he had written.
Toynbee's
Western Question was hot off the presses while Smyrna was in flames.
The New Statesman, on 16 September 1922, was praising its author for
his unbiased account of Turkish history and drawing from it the conclusion
that the minorities deserved scant sympathy. Before long Toynbee expressed the
opinion that although the truth about the burning of Smyrna could never be
known, the Armenians shared the responsibility for it.
The
destruction of Carthage and the great fires of Rome and London ring familiar
echoes in the Western consciousness today, but the spectacular destruction of
a great city a mere fifty years ago has been largely forgotten. Indeed the
period 1914-22 in Turkey appears by now to have fallen into an historical
abyss between the mountain of writings concerned with the end of the Ottoman
Empire and the growing mound of books dealing with Kemal Ataturk's republic.
In the midst of such historical indifference the Turks officially continue
to maintain that the “alleged massacres” of Armenians in 1915 were merely
the measures necessary to put down a revolt. The Greeks, they insist, set the
torch to Smyrna in 1922.
The
historical consensus as reflected in the Encyclopaedia Britannica appears
to support this view. The 1970 edition refers to the city's destruction in
terms of “war damage” inflicted during the Greek retreat. It emphasizes
“atrocities against the Turkish population” during the Greek occupation in
1919. Taking their cue from Toynbee,* most British and American experts on
modern Turkish history continue to overlook the shortcomings and to extol the
virtues of Turkey's emergent nationalism under the Young Turks and Mustafa
Kemal, whose title Ataturk, “Father of the Turks”, was bestowed by
his countrymen in recognition of his services. The liquidation of the
minorities, when mentioned at all, is weighed as a fundamental advance toward
homogeneity.
Not
everyone is equally concerned about the historical record, but at least one
student of history compared the parade of events in Turkey with their
subsequent dismissal and acted on a cynical conclusion. “Who, after all,
speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians,” Hitler declared as he
announced his own plans for genocide to his Supreme Commanders on 22 August
1939. “The world believes in success alone.”
The
survivors of the Smyrna fire have the advantage of a more profound insight.
Those interviewed did not fail to emphasize that in the midst of a holocaust
provoked by hatred and abetted by greed, each owed his or her life to an act
of compassion and courage. In so doing they acknowledged the ambiguities which
others reject in an age that both tempts and defies easy solutions.
The
course of history since 1922 suggests that the ultimate victims may be those
who delude themselves.
__________________________________________
*
Curiously enough, specialists in virtually every other historical area have
criticized Toynbee's distortion of crucial particulars in their respective
fields.
END
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