British Propaganda And The Turks

**Big K** · 20 May 07, 17:21

BRITISH PROPAGANDA AND THE TURKS

Prof. Justin McCarthy
(Presentation made at the School of Oriental and African Studies on 19 January 2001)

This evening I am going to consider something that I have noticed for many years.That is the basic assumption in Europe and America that the Turks must be in the wrong, whether the question is human rights, activities in Cyprus, the Armenian Question,Turkish-Greek relations, or al most any other contentious subject. Often it is assumed that the Turks are evil. If there is a question of comparative guilt, it is assumed that the Turks were most guilty. Turks have to prove themselves three times for every one esseftion provided by their opponents.

All of this may surprise those of you who have known Turks well and have found that Turks are human beings like anyone else. But the unfairness with which Turks are treated does not surprise those of us who have looked into te background of the views and prejudices people have of the Turks.

I will not be speaking only of British propaganda tonight, but of the effects of what the British propaganda machine produced in World War I. That means I will alsa be discussing America, where that propaganda had its greatest effect.

The reasons for the iII feeling against Turks that is of ten seen in Western countries, as all of you know, go back to the Middle Ages. They go back to the period in which the name Muhammad was virtually synonymous with the Devil in Western culture. Europeans and Americans had a jang memory of conflict between Christianity and Islam, and Turks were the politicalleaders of Islam.

The particular image of the Turk as the enemy developed in the nineteenth century along what can be described as facialist lines. In the United States, as well as in Britain, books were printed which portrayed the Turks as members of groups of people who were described almost uniformly as viciaus. "Brutal" was the prirnary adiectiye that was used to deseribe them. In America, and i suspect in Britain as well, we feared something called the "Yellow Peril." The Yellow Peril supposedly was a great danger to the "white racelf (a fine example of psychological transference, since at the time Europeans were much more likely to assault Asiatics than vi ce versa). The Turks were portrayed as being at the forefront of the yellow peril, the leaders of the Yellow Peril. Those who had never seen a Turk found this an easy mental exercise: Turks lived in Asia. Turks were great warriors. Therefore, Turks led the Yellow Peril.

Traditional facialist and religious animosity against Turks has left a legacy of prejudice that has affected European and American feelings about Turks in dur own day. But Westerners have jang held religious and racial prejudices about many peoples. None of these prejudices seems to rise to the level of the feelings against the Turks. No other group is assumed to be so violent and brutal, nar is any other group so often and routinely assumed to be wrong in all its disputations with other peoples. There is more to the feelings against Turks than traditional animosities.

From my experience in many years of teaching American students and in many years of deciing with the American public, I believe the Armenian Question has been the primary ageney through which animosity against the Turks has been advanced. The conflict between Turks and Armenians during World War I has had a permanent affect on the beliefs and prejudices of Americans and arts. In America today, if you esk someone, "What do you know about Turks?" you will very find that the only thing they think they know about Turks is summarized in one statement: "killed all those Armenians, didn't they?" That is it, the sum of knowledge on the Turks.

Today in America, the alleged genocide of the Armenians is included in the books that teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren. Through political influence and writers' ignorance, it has been included as another example of inhumanity, a false example. Through the ageney of Holocaust Studies, American children are learning what is usually the only thing they ever learn about Turks, and that is the so-called Armenian Genoeide. Most American school children see nothing else about Turks in their schoolbooks. Theyonly see Turks in their study of what Turks supposedly did to .Armenians; and I might say, it is a completely one-sided description at that. The feeling about Turks is so ingrained that it is impossible to have rational dialogue on the subject. But the question remains-where does all this come from? Why do the otherwise caring and liberal academics who write on the Holocaust feel it proper to vilify one people, the Turks, without considering any other side of a contested issue? In studying the prejudices against Turks, I have found two basic causes for the ingrained anti-Turkish feeling in western soeiety, and especially in America. The one is the work of American missionaries and the other is British propaganda during and immediately af ter World War One. This evening, as the title of my talk indicates, I am going to speak on the British and about British propaganda.

During World War I there were many reasons for propaganda, but the most common was simply the desire make your enemy look bad. Any propaganda organization intends to downplay the good side and emphasize the bad side of its enemies. The most well known example of this is the anti-German propaganda of World War I-the babies on bayonets, the starving Belgians, the rape of nuns. The intention of this propaganda was to draw neutrals to the side of Britain, the primary neutral of course being the United States. But propaganda is also useful as a moraleý builder for one's own side. It can make people feel they are fighting a holy crusade against evil. In some cases, especially in the second world war, this was true. There was a definite evil to be opposed. In the first war it was much harder to identify one side as more evil than the other, and thus propaganda was all the more needed. In addition to the general desire to defame one's enemies, there were very specific reasons British propaganda would come out against the Turks. One of them was the traditional British opinion of the Turks, at least among those who thought of the Turks at all. Those Britons had a very ambivalent feeling towards Turks. This had been true for some time. The best example of this is probably the period of the 1876 Bulgarian Rebellion, when Disraeli's and Gladstone's visions of the Turks alternated in the public mind. At first, the public image was negative; the Turks were blamed for the "Bulgarian Horrors." But soo n af ter the British changed their minds and the public cried out for war with Russia to defend the Attornan Empire (and British self-interest). From that time until World War iý a number of travelers, diplomats, and others wrote kindly of the Turks, balaneing the writings of those, espeeially British missionaries and other clergymen, whose opinions were not so favorable. A feeling developed that the Turks, while bad in some ways, stili had many good qualities. They were not Christians, but they were honest and could be relied upon. The word of a Turk was good. The feeling about Turks in Britain was not necessarily bad at the beginning of World War One. This is especially true once Turks started actually fighting the British. Favorable reports of Turks came back to Britain, even appearing in some newspapers that were allied with the government. These reports described the Turks as men of honor. It seems to me, looking back without any good scientific evidence, that the British officer corps and the Turkish officer corps had very much in common; honor was a very important thing to both of them and they both could rely on the word and the actions of the other.

This was not the kind of thing that the British government wanted its people to believe about one of their arch enemies. It is very difficult to fight a war against people if you feel you must say good things about them. Something had to be done to change this image.

Another intent of British propaganda was to counter the image of Russia, espeeially in the United States. Britain wanted the United States to take its side in the war, or at least to remain a friendly neutral. In the United States, Russia had a very bad image, a well-deserved bad image, because it had been involved in the persecution of the Jews for some time, speeifically in 1915. Then Russian soldiers had massacred large numbers of Jews during Russian campaigns against the Germans. Because of that and because reports of these atrocities reports had come back to the United States, Russia, one of Britain's allies, had become a very negative factor in trying to draw America into the war. It was feared that the Jewish influence in America was so great that the Russian actions would harm Britain. This was ridiculous. However, throughout World War I, from the very beginning ders of the war through the Balfour Declaration and beyand, there was a great belief, a prejudiced belief, in something called "The Jews" and the "Power of the Jews." As we know, in the war the German Jews fought on the side of Germany and the English Jews fought on the side of England. But the feeling that there was some great and powerful internationalorganization of Jews was strong even in the British government. People took actian based on their belief in it. The British feared that the Jews were powerful in America and would favor the Central Powers.AIso, and again this is something that is hard for us to believe today, there was a great fear about India.

There was fear at the time that Indian Muslims would engage in a Jihad, a holy war, against the Allies, alongside their brother Muslims in the Onarnan Empire. There was never realýr a chance this would happen. With hindsight, we can see that, but at the time the British Government feared a Muslim reyolt. If you could make the Turks look evil, then you could teach the Indian Muslims that the Muslim Turks were really bad Muslims, not the sort of people who should be followed into war or anywhere else.

Looking back today, such things may seem hard to believe. I can only assure you that they definitely were believed at the time.

To the British, the most important of all things was to lure Americans against the Central Powers. Eventually, as you know, Britain was to sLlccessfully draw America into the war. Those who have looked over the archival record know that the Wilson administration was in favor of the British and other Allied Powers long before America entered the war. They needed justifications to allow them to enter the war, to convince the American people that the Central Powers should be opposed. The Turks were a ready target, because propaganda against them was aýready available. One force available to the propagandists was the American Missionary . Propagandists could play upon the great respect Americans held for the missionaries who had güne to the Onarnan Empire, and who of ten appeared in the newspapers as national heroes for a Christian Nation. The American feeling of affection and respect for the missionaries could be mobilized as a force to oppose the natural anti-Allied feeling among many Americans, a feeling espedelýr prominent among the Germans and the Irish. If the Turks could be portrered as the persecutors of missionaries and murderers of Christians, the taint would alsa pass to the Germans. Portraying the Germans as the sort of people who would deal with those evil Turks, and indeed lead those evil Turks into battle, would show the American public how bad those Germans were. Indeed, this policy was to be greatly successful in affecting American public opinion.

The British ageney entrusted with changing public opinion was at first called the War Propaganda Bureau. It was a part of the Foreign Office. In 1914 it was stationed in Wellington House. The Director was the Right Honorable C. F. Masterman. In December of 1916 it was made into the Department of Information under Calanel John Buchan, with Masterman as his deputy. Later, in 1918, a Ministry of Information was created, under Lord Beaverbrook.. However, to the people who were involved in British propaganda the propaganda office always was the same. It was simpir called Wellington House.

The policy committee that operated Wellington House had so me first class minds. In fact the committee was very heavy with historians. The committee included people such as Gooch and Toynbee, the latter of whom we will be saying much.

The Wellington House brief was simple, the same brief as that of all propagandists. They were to make the enemies look as bad as possible and make their friends, and especially the British themselves, look as good as could be. Their main focus was, naturaýýY, Germany, but much effort was expended against the Turks. Propaganda was not considered to be a gentleman's game. Toynbee himself remarked that he would like to get out of it for that reason. Nevertheless it was something that had to be done and British gentlemen did it. They were probebly always ashamed of their work, however, as indicated by the tact that they destroyed all the records of the Propaganda Office immediately af ter the war.

The only Propaganda Office records that exist have often been found by chance. Some few were found when the British again took up propaganda during World War II and found they did not know what to do.

They said, "You know, we obviously had a propaganda ministry. They did good work, very good work actually. How did they do it?" They searched for documents from the first war and in total found four Ietters, all the records that had been kept, and these were hidden away. Over the years other documents have gradualýr emerged. I actually have found a number of them myself as i have gone through Foreign Office documents. They were records that had been sent off to other offices. Although the originals were destroyed, some copies were kept in relevant Foreign Office departments, especially in the Foreign Office records for the United States. So we have a modest number of documents. They indicate some smail part of what Wellington House did.

Table One: Wellington House Publications Distributed.
Publications
1914 45
1915 132
1916 202
1917 469
Distributed
By June, 1915 2.5 million
By February, 1916 7 million

We have enough to show that they were extremely busy. We have enough to show that they were engaged in a massive undertaking. Unfortunately what we do not have are the documents that would show us the day to day workings of Wellington House. We do not know, for instance, how many American journalists they got drunk so that they would be receptive to the official tales that were told. We do not know how many stories they planted, or who was paid what. We do not have those kinds of references. We do, however, have one specific group of Foreign Office records for propaganda that was sent from London, especially to America. These records show the numbers of publications distributed. Unfortunately we do not know exactly what those publications were. We only know that they were publications of Wellington House. As you can see from the numbers, starting out on a very smail rate in 1914, the number of publications they brought out kept on going up until there were quite a sizeable number of them distributed. By June of 1915 they had distributed two and a half million publications. Not even a year later, seven million publications. Unfortunately we do not have any record that goes beyond that. We are lucky to have this at all. It can be assumed that the numbers continued to grow.

What that means in essence is that Wellington House was a massiye undertaking. We do have two good sources for the kind of work that was done. The main source is a book in the Imperial War Museum that is simpir identified as "Wellington House Library". Now this would ordinarily mean the books on their shelves, but actually these are the books that Wellington House distributed-the books that they had written for them, and the books that were written by someone else which they bought and distributed because they liked them. The only reason we know that is because when they destroyed everything else Wellington House kept copies of bound books, which they obviously saw no reason to destroy. And so the books that Wellington House possessed were sent off to the Foreign Office Library, eventually to the publicly-available Foreign Office library, where anyone can now read them. Studying in that library, i saw a strange notation written by hand in one of the bound book catalogues. Out of curiosity i requested the book, which i believe had not been seen since 1918. They blew the dust off and brought it over to me. it was the Wellington House record of the distribution of propaganda books. It was all hand written in ledger form, but someone had very carefully bound it. That meant it had been taken to be an ordinary bound book, and thus was not destroyed. So we have the list and know the books that were distributed by Wellington House.

Table Two: Wellington House Publications on Turks.

EF. Benson, Crescent and Iran Cross
EF. Benson, Deutschland uber Allah
British Palestine Committee, Palestine
M. Sykes, The "Clean-Fighting Turk", a Spurious Claim
Israel Cohen, The Turkish Persecution of the Jews
anon., The Commercial Future of Baghdad
Edward Cook, Britain and Turkey
Delegates of the Red Cross, Turkish Prisoners in Egypt
Leon Dominion, The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe
Fa'iz EI-Ghusein, "Bedouin Notable of Damascus" [sic] Martyred Armenia
anon., General Sir Edmund Allenby's Dispatch or the Operations in Egypt and Palestine
S. Georgevitch, Serbia and Kosovo
anon., Germany, Turkey, and Armenia: Selections of Documentary Evidence
anon., Great Britain, Palestine, and the Jews: Jewry's Celebration of its National Charter
anon., Great Britain,. Palestine, and the Jews: A Survey of Christian Opinion
AP. Hacobian, Armenia and the War
E WG. Masterman, The Deliverance of Jerusalem
Basil Mathews, The Freedom oUerusalem
Esther Mugerditchian, From Turkish Toils
Martin Niepage, The Horrors of Aleppo
anon., The Ottoman Domination
Canon Parfit, Mesopotamia: the Key to the Future
Pavle Popovic, Serbian Macedonia
anon., Report on the Pan-Turan ian Movement
R. W. Seton-Watson, Serbia, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
George Adam Smith, Syria and the Holy Land
Harry Stuermer, Two War Years in Constantinople
anon., Subiect Nationalities of the German A/liance
anon., Syria During March 7976: Her Miseries and Disasters
S. Tolkowsky, Jewish Calanisation in Palestine
Arnold J Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: the murder of aNation
Arnold J Toynbee, ed., The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 7975 - 7976
Arnold J Toynbee, Turkey' A Past and a Future
Arnold J Toynbee, The Murderous Tyranny of Turks
Josiah Wedgwood, M.P., With Machine-Guns in Gallipoli
Chaim Weizmann, R. Gottheil, What is Zionism?
JS. Willmore, The Welfare of Egypt

The list of publications is long, but for the Middle East there are o more limited number of books. The table gives only those volumes, but it oHers an idea of the breadth and the scope of the Wellington House interests. They included Palestine, Jews and Lionism, and especially the Turks, quite abit about the Turks. i have left oH o number of other books that had multiple subjects, such as The Germans and the Turks, what the Germans were doing in the Middle East, or Toynbee's work on the "subject nationalities of the German empire." Even with those excluded, there is o large number of books, so I have selected o few as examples.

Table Three: Selected Wellington House Publications.

E. W.G. Masterman, The Deliverance of Jerusalem
Fa'iz EI-Ghusein, Bedouin Notable of Damascus" [sic] Martyred Armenia
Mark Sykes, The "Clean-Fighting Turk, " a Spurious Claim
Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: the Murder of aNation
Amold J. Toynbee, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks
Amold J. Toynbee, ed. The Treatment of Armenians in the Attornan Empire, 1915-1916

The first one is by aman named Masterman. i do not really know if this Masterman is related to the other. Perhaps someone in the audience does know. Thus book is an example of relatively harmless propaganda. It does little injury to anyone, beceuse it really is a celebration of the fact that Jerusalem was now once again in the hands of the Christians, thanks to the British, who succeeded where the Crusaders failed. It is primarily a positive statement about the British. Whether you feel that the British conquest of Jerusalem was a good or a bad thing depends on which side you are on, I expect. But this book does not do much damage to the Turks or anyone else. There are a number of publications like this. Their primary purpose was to extol the British.

One of my favorites is the next one. Notice this rather strange loaking name, Fa'iz EI-Ghusein. The book says this EI-Ghusein was "a Bedouin notable of Damascus". Of course, the term Bedouin notable of Damascus is perhaps by itself an indication that something is wrong. But there is quite abit more. Let me give you his description from the book. It says he was the son of one of the heads, whatever that means, of a Bedouin tribe that lived in the Hawran, an interesting statement in itself. He had been educated in Istanbul and was employed as a bureaucrat in the Attornan government. He was put on the staff of the Vali of Damascus, then he was made Kaymakam, or the district leader, of Mamuretulaziz. He then became Member for Hawran of "the Assembly in Damascus". Now I can see the people who are familiar the Attornan Government saying, "Wait a minute, there are some problem s here." Wait. He states he was arrested by Cemal Pasa, the governar of Syria. He was imprisoned in Diyarbakir, a city in the southeastern part of Turkey, and then he was released. In Diyarbakir, according to his own story, he heard much of the massacres of Armenians. He heard what was going on and he thought he had to do something to record it. So he escaped to Basra and then to India, where he wrote his report. And it made its way to the British Foreign Office. The book does not ever say the manuscript made its way to the British Foreign Office, it just says it made its way to England, where it was published. There is no indication of its delivery to Wellington House, London.

There are a number of internal inconsistencies in this story, errors that should not have been made by a supposed Attornan official, such as placing cities in the wrong provinces. But forgetting about those, if you read the book you will notice that he wrote about things that he never could have known, secret conversations. In fact there was at the time almost a closet industry in making up quotes from Talat' Pasa. He seems to have set in prison hearing what Talat Pasa was telling Enver Pasa in the cabinetin Istanbul, writing it down for later publication. Where he found this information i am not sure. He alsa knew about secret activities of Armenian revolutionary leaders, news of which was alsa reaching him in his prison in the Diyarbakir. Obviously this is more than unlikely.

He gaye great detail. He talked about what was done to Armenians, who stole their goods, which Attornan official was here, which man was there. Some of this is hard to evaiuate. If he says, "Ahmet Bey took the Armenians' goods," you might esk yourself which of the hundreds of Ahmet Beys he was discussing, and whether the author knew himself. So you are not sure, but it does look a little strange. Outright lies are easier to spot: He states that after the Balkan wars large numbers of Turks were settled in Zeytun. Of course, none were settled there as amatter of fact, but who among the readers would have known? The stories he tells about what the Turks did to the Armenians are, even under the category of war stories, absolutely horrible. They include Turkish soldiers copulating with Armenian corpses.

From reading the book alone one can see that it has all been made up, but the most telling thing about Fa'iz al-Ghusein com es from an investigation of Ottoman records: There was no such person. If he indeed was employed in the government in either Syria or Mamuretulaziz he would have appeared in the list of government officials. Not only is there no Fa'iz al-Ghusein, there is no Fa'iz at all. The man simply did not exist. He was never there. Because Wellington house burned their records, we do not know who actually did write the book, but we can trust that it wasn't Fa'iz.

Another favorite of mine is The Clean-fighting Turk, a Spurious Claim. Mark Sykes, as many of you know, was a great traveler and a very intelligent man. He was one of the two people that negotiated the SykesPicot Agreement that was to lead to the dividing up of the Middle East by the British and French after the war. But this story should began with Lloyd George, who did not like Turks very much and who, of course, was Prime Minister. Lloyd George was very interested in defaming the Turks and was personally interested in the propaganda bureau. He instructed that certain topics be developed by the bureau: "The Turk's incapacity for good Government; his misrule, and above all, his massacres of all the industrious population". An order frq.m the Prime Minister. He added that the propaganda should be surreptitious: "I need hardly point out that it is very important that all this should be done gradually and that the artides should be spread over a considerable period of time, so as not to make it too obvious what we are driving at. Sir Mark Sykes' artide in the Times,' the 'Clean-Fighting Turk,' is just what we want".

The Sykes artide can be considered the template for what was produced for the press. Unfortunately, we may never know what all those artides were. If you go through the American and the British press you can read artides and say to yourself, "That must be Wellington House work'lI but you cannot prove it.

This one we know. The Foreign Office saw a problem, the problem mentioned before-the Turks looked too good to many people in Britain. They were especially bothered by the image of what was called the "Clean Fighting Turk", the image drawn from the fact that the T urks did a good iob as soldiers and could be relied as men of honor. Now we will not discuss the accuracy of that daim here. The important point is that it was believed. And so something had to be done about it. Someone had to negate this image, write against it. And so their Foreign Office masters directed Wellington House to do something about the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. The writing of the original message was somewhat mistaken. Wellington House received an order that said they were to propagandize and bring out the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. Wellington House wrote back and said, "Why in the world would you want us to prove that the Turks are dean fighting?" The matter was finally deared up.

Wellington House went to Mark Sykes and asked him to write an artide attacking the good image of the Turks. He agreed and wrote an artide. We do not know if what he wrote was much changed by Wellington House, because the relevant records are burned, but we know he wrote the artide. We do know that once Mark Sykes' artide was finally done a deal was made with the London Times to not only have it published, but alsa to buy a hundred thousand off-prints. The Times patriotically suggested a good price and the Foreign Office patriotically haggled with them for an even lower price. Forty pounds was paid for a hundred thousand copies.

The artide, which was printed at The Times and reprinted all over the United States, used words such as "a merciless oppressor," "a remorseless bully," "pure barbarians," "degenerate," and "has strewn the earth with ruins". It was one of the nicer propaganda works, actually. Sykes fabricated quotes nem the Ottoman government once again. Or perhaps Talat Pasa kindly told him of his plans. If you wish, you can believe he was in contact with the Ottoman government. Among the truly amazing things he wrote are statements such as that the Turks had invaded and destroyed Baghdad. The historians in the audience are shaking their heads. It was the Mongols, of course. Sykes knew much better. Conflate the history of the Turks and the Mongols? Put all the harm caused by the Mongols on the shoulders of the Turks? Well, you can get away with these things if you know that those who will read the artide have no idea about the history. But Sykes knew the truth.

Lloyd George and the Foreign Office were both very happy. Thirty two thousand copies of this publication were sent to the United States alone.

And now Arnold J. Toynbee, in many ways a great historian, at least a much respected and revered historian in many quarters. In nothing Toynbee wrote on the Armenians was there ever an indication of who his employers were, which was Wellington House, the propaganda bureau. He retained the image of a scholar who was writing on his own, or perhaps in collusion, or perhaps collusion isn't the best word, cooperation with others.

We will go over his first title, The Armenian Atrocities, the Murder of aNation, only briefly. I will not sar much about the book itself other than to sar it was an extended catalogue of evils of the Turks. Toynbee mentioned therein that the Armenian refugees who had come to Alexandria were suffering terribly, that they were starving, that they were "dying of disease, exposure and starvation." This, of course, coused the British in Alexandria who were taking care of these people to be abit upset. The heads of the British agencies in Alexandria wrote back to the Foreign Office bitterly complaining, saying, "What do you mean? We are feeding these people, theyare not dying of starvation and disease. Both births and deaths are both completely normaL" Toynbee apologized.

The other book, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks is interesting for some of its quotes and as an example of the kind of book that was created by Wellington House. I will just deseribe a few representative selections: Toynbee stated the Turks were engaged in the "maiming and warping of more gifted peoples". This, he wrote, had occurred throughout Turkish history. From the beginning, Turks had maimed and warped "more gifted" peoples. The racist qualities of such a statement need no elaboration. In 1913, according to Toynbee, Turks had been engaged in exterminating the Albanians. "Absolute lies," is all you can sar. Af ter the Balkan wars Turks "exterminated all Greeks and Slavs left in their territory". This may surprise those Greeks who survived to fight against the Turks in their independence war-according to Toynbee they had all been killed. He related that Turks had attacked the Arabs, and that Turks were indeed planning right then to exterminate all the Arabs. Turks had no civilization: "They had nothing but the militery tradition of violence and cunning". Perhaps abit intemperate. In fact, an incredible diatribe of a book.

But the book I want to concentrate on, because it is the one that has been most discussed Iateýr, including in the House of Lords, is a book called The Treatment of Armenians in the Attornan Empire, 1915-1916. As you can see, even for a command paper this is a weighty tone. Lord Bryce, the putative author of this book, was a long standing friend of Armenians and enemy of Turks. He was the founder of an Anglo-Armenian Association in 1893. He was very important to the propaganda bureau because he was so respected. He was the President of the British Academy, a former cabinet minister and a very important figure, especially in the United States. You have surely noticed this quality among some Americans, the way they fawn on the British. It is a realýr strange cultural phenomenon, and a very old one. This was definitely the case with Bryce, who was loved in America, partýr because as the British Ambassador he had been such a friend of the United States, partly because he had written a history of the United States, the American Commonwealth, which glossed over all of our faults and seng many high praises of our limited goods. An American would not have written in such a laudatory tone.

The official story was that Bryce, who had friends who were Armenians, had been reading notes sent by Armenians, and that he had decided he had better collect the facts and write a book about it. So he asked Toynbee, who was, I forget the words he used, "a notable young scholar and researcher," something like that. He asked Toynbee if he would compile a book. They then presented the book to Lord Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Lord Grey in turn presented it to Parliament. Parliament was so impressed by it that they asked it to be published as a "command" book. In fact that is not at all what happened. What happened was the Propaganda Bureau asked Bryce for a propaganda volume, and said, "We have this man Toynbee here who is pretty good. He can put it together for yow." And that is exactly what happened.

I want to examine the content. The book is six hundred and eighty four pages long and there are so many errors and inconsistencies that we will be here much longer than the time allotted if we consider each of them. We will just talk about the reliability of the sources and the production of the book. One source was Ietters by Armenians and Armenian organizations. Armenian newsparers were also a source, newsparers like Ararat and Gotchnag. But the biggest sources, the main ones, were American missionaries and missionaryorganizations. Now, in order to understand why this is a problem, we have to examine those missionaries as sources, something that has not been done in the recent reprint of The Treatment of Armenians in the Attornan Empire, 1915-1916, which also incidentally does not mention that Toynbee worked for the Propaganda Bureau. A digression on Missionaries: The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief was founded in November of 1915. There were other Armenian relief organizations before that. According to the circular that went out when the organization was founded, it was a "nonsectarian" organization. The table shows the bo ard of directors of that organization. We do not have time to go through the whole list, but if you were to do so, you would notice that every single member of the board, excert one, was part of the American protestant missionary establishment. The exception, obviously, being Rabbi Wise, who was not a Protestant Missionary. Everyone else was a missionary or a member of a missionary support group. Many of them had been through the mission field at some point or other.

The leaders of the main missionary groups-the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, and others-were all members of these organizations. "Secretary" meant the boss in these organizations. These people began their new mission to aid the Armenians with a relatively smail pamphlet, in which they identified why people should heir their organization. It began, of course, with atrocity propaganda. Naturally Talat Pasa was spuriously quoted once again. Talat Pasa supposedly said, "the Armenians would pray for massacre." That is, he was going to treat the Armenians so badly that they would rather be dead. I personally find it hard to believe that he really would have said these things to missionaries.

Table Four: Board of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief
James L.Barton A Secretary (Head) of the ABCFM
Charles R. Crane President, Board of Trustees, Constantinople College for Women (missionary college)
Samuel Dutton Treasurer, Constantinople College for Women
Charles Dodge Chairman, Board of Trustees, Robert College (missionary college)
D. Stuart Dodge Member, Board of Trustees, American University of Beirut (missionary college)
Stanley White Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Missions.
William Chamberlain Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Reformed Church.
Samuel Harper Beginning a mission to Russia.
Frank Mason North Secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions
Thomas D. Christie Missionary in Anatolia
William I. Haven Secretary of the American Bible Society
Charles MacFarland Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches
Arthur C. James Member, Board of Trustees of AU.B.

Edward L.Smith
A Secretary of ABCFM
Edwin Nt. Bulkley Member of the Presbyterian Board of Missions.
John R. Mott Representing the YMCA
Rabbi Stephen Wise Chairman, Jewish Emergency Relief Comm.
George A Plimpton Member, Board of Trustees, Constantinople College for Women

The introductory pamphlet spoke of rapes, enslavements, and the "murders of nearly all able-bodied Armenian men above the age of twelve." The Relief Organization engaged in an eight-year policy of vilifying Turks, from 1915 to 1923. It is interesting that in 1923, once the Turks had won and the Mission obviously would not survive unless they got along with the Turks, suddenly all changed. Suddenly Turks were being praised by missionaries. But until then, the Turks were evil. To build their missionary organization was one of their purposes, but their main purpose was a good one. Their main purpose was to colled money for what indeed were starving Armenian and Syrian (Assyrian) Christians, to try to make sure that these people had food and the orphans had shelter. It was a good purpose. They used a not-so-good means to get the money, which was to vilify the Turks in every way, because there is nothing that draws in funds like portraying a horrible enemy that is oppressing these people and will succeed unless you help, unless you contribute. Which is what they did.

Later on the missionary establishment attempted to get the United States government to actually take over and turn Turkey into an America mandate. They failed that because the American Congress refused, saying, basically, that it would be bad for business and would cost too much.

Studying what they preached unfortunately takes a long time. You must read much truly disgusting literature. What they wrote was not what one would expect of clergymen. Yet one reason they were so successful is exactly that people expected that clergymen would not lie.

We only have time for a few examples. One of the leaders of the missionary propagandists was a man named Rockwell, who I will deseribe in a moment. He wrote in one of his pamphlets, "Never since the world began has there been such a reign of torture and of butchery as that to which the Ottoman hordes have subjected this helpless and unoffending nation. It is a scheme planned by high and skilled ability [the Germans] and carried out by low brutality [the Turks]."

In all of the writir.gs of the missionaries Turks were never victims; Armenians were always victims. Armenians never killed; Turks always killed. Turks, and i am not exaggerating in any way, Turks persecuted orphans; Turks were cannibals; Turks held auctions of Armenian women; Armenians were a majority all over the east of Anatolia; all young Armenian males had been killed by Turks; all women, every one, were raped by Turks; the Turks hated education and always persecuted the educated; no Christians had ever been part of the Ottoman government. Turks needed Christians because the Turks were racially incapable of being "doctors, dentists, tailors, carpenters, every profession or trade requiring the least skill". And the missionaries wrote that now that the Turks had killed the Armenians, Westerners who were going to have to come in and take over Turkey, because the Turks had rid themselves of the only people with brains, the Armenians, and the Turks could not run the country themselves.

As the missionaries described them, Armenians were happier than the other inhabitants of the Near East. The Muslims had "pinched faces, pele faces, anxious faces, careworn faces, listless faces.hungry faces,sickly faces of little children, and older faces that had grown sour and sullen". But Armenians smiled.

The main Protestant missionary propaganda was, or course, religious. James levi Barton, the leader of the relief organization, wrote "[Armenians] are suffering for no fault of their own, but because their lot was east in a land where no Christian power was able to protect and because, they would not remove the lord Jesus Christ from their alters and put Mohammed in his place."

The fact that the Turks had been running what was called Armenia for eight hundred years and the Armenians were stili there would see m to argue against that. Of course the propagandists didn't bother with that sort of explanation. To us today these kinds of things are crude and unbelievable, and i imagine you would probably be laughing if you didn't think this was a serious topic. But Americans especially, and many other people in the world, including most people in Britain, knew little of Turks or of Muslims in general. Such descriptions of Turks would have seemed perfectly reasonable to them.

The most important factor about the missionaries as far as I am concerned is that they did not hesitate to lie, most of these lies being lies of omission. For example, there were two major books written about the rebellion of the Armenians in the city of Van, one by a missionary named Ussher, anather by a missionary named Knapp. The Knapp book was excerpted in the Bryce Report. To the missionaries, no Turks or Kurds ever died in Van, except for four sentences in the three hundred and fifty-page book written by Ussher in which he stated that Armenians sometimes taek revenge against the Muslims. Ussher mitigated that by stating that these were people who deserved to die.

The fact is that Armenians had slaughtered every Muslim man, women, and child they caught in the city of Van. They rounded up the Kurds in surrounding villages and killed them in the great natural bowl at Zeve. If the missionaries missed that, they must have been both blind and hiding in the basement. Yet you read all the missionary literature and the only people who died were Armenians. This makes one wonder what happened to all those dead Muslims. They must have committed suicide.

This campain, the missionary campaign, was a great success. It gained a hundred and sixteen millian dallers, which, if you calevlete it in mode_ money, was the most successful private charity campaign in American history. Posters in public buildings, sermons in churches, door-to-door campaigns, pamphlets, press releases-it was the biggest such campaign ever see n in America. It has never been superseded in its scope or in the amount of money that was spent or that was taken in. Leading every one of the missionaries' pleas to charity was an attack on Turks.

There was complete cooperation between the missionaries and the British Propaganda Bureau. They sent materials to Toynbee; in turn the missionaries distributed Wellington House propaganda material. For example, three thousand copies of Toynbee's Armenian atrocities were distributed in America by the missionary relief organizations. The United States Government forwarded missionary materials on using government distribution systems. The government gaye secret documents to the missionaries, who extracted sections from them. These eventually made their way to Toynbee with the statement, "Under no circumstances reveal source".

The missionary establishment leaders most involved in providing propaganda to Toynbee were James Barton and William Rockwell. Barton had been a missionary in Anatolia. He was a Congregational minister and the head of the American Board of Commissioners For Foreign Missions, the largest of the American missionary groups. He had become the head of the main relief organization, the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. William Rockwell was alsa a minister, at Columbia Theological Seminary, I believe a Presbyterian. He was the Chief Propagandist of the American Committee. They were joined as Toynbee's prime sources by a gentlemen in Switzerland, LEopold Favre, who had published the first of the World War l Armenian atrocity books, Quelcques, Documents sur le sert des Armeniens en 1915. And, of course, there was Boghos Nubar Pasha who had been the Prime Minister of Egypt and was now the head of what was called The Armenian National Delegation, of which he had named himself head. He was a well-known Armenian apologist.

Barton, Rockwell, Favre, Nubar, all these people provided materials to Toynbee, read the manuscripts, suggested emendations, and read the proofs. At one point Nubar wrote to Toynbee concerning one document, "Drop the phrases that make Turks lock good". Which Toynbee then did. The original source of nearly all the documents was the missionaries and the Armenians. And i think you can probably see that these were the two least reliable sources one can imagine.

The Blue Book, as it is called, was a collectian of letters, pamphlets and artides with an introduction by Bryce. This introduction was a summary of Armenian history with,p view to excoriating the Turks. In the documents of the Blue Book, many of the sources were not identified. This, it was alleged, was beceuse of the need to protect them, which could indeed have been reasonable. They were called: A, B, C, X, F or words were used, such as, "a traveler" or "a foreign resident." Place names were disguised.

Now, unless one knows who those people were, their documents do indeed make the Armenian case. When you do know their identities, the picture changes. Years age in the Public Record Office I found o smail booklet that was printed for private circulation within the Foreign Office. Others have alsa seen it. The booklet identifies the authors of all the contributors to the book, at least all of those who were known to Toynbee. AIso, Toynbee's papers on the construction of the Blue Book (which i think he must have iIIegaIIy taken away from Wellington House) are now available in the PRO. I have them all on microfilm from the PRO.

The booklet and Toynbee's records show an interesting story, one that is duplicitous, to say the least. Toynbee and Wellington House may indeed have been trying to protect sources. But it alsa must be faced that they did not saf who the sources were because the truth of their deception would have been obvious if they had. Instead, Bryce wrote, "All possible sources were seen" and "The respondents do not know each other". This was an outright lie. Some of the authors were missionaries who had compared notes before they wrote. In his Ietters, Toynbee remarked how similar the accounts seemed. He found that the authors had read other the pieces of others or had spoken to other authors before writing. Yet the Blue Book stated that because the accounts were completely independent the similarity of their stories proved that they were true! The similarities avowedly proved their reliability.

Waiting that the authors did not know each other was more than disingenuous, since sometimes they were the same people entered under different names, so they must have known each other fairly well. My favorite example is one Professor Xenides. He was o professor at the American missionary college in Merzifon. Three quotes from him were used. In the first two quotes he was identified a: "a professor at the College of X." He actually was o professor at o college in which all the student were Armenians, and he himself was o Greek. Now it might have helped readers to evaluate his writings if this had been identified, but it is easy to understand why it wasn't. He alsa was the source of anather completely separate statement in which he was identifjed as "o traveler not of Armenian nationality". That was true. He was o Greek and he was o traveler, because he was teaching some miles away from his home. He was, according to the Blue Book, two different peeple, perhaps with o split personality. I think it is undoubtedly true that Professor Xenides number one did indeed agree with Professor Xenides number two.

The missionaries who heard things -they almost never actually saw the things they reported-were sometimes described only as "American travelers". Indeed, if you believe this book you will find that there were an incredible number of American travelers going through Anatolia during this period of the First World War. They were in fact all missionaries, or their wives, or their sisters. They were described as travelers. Readers reading this would have thought these were travelers from America, but indeed they were not. A number of authors were listed only as "An Authoritative Source". This included the Armenian Patriarch, described only as "An Authoritative Source".

The largest group of authors were American missionaries, fifty-nine out of o hundred and fifty. Next came individual Armenians, fifty-two. Many times only the name of these Armenian contributors was known, to Toynbee, not who they were or any information on their bono fides, only their name. Many times not even that was known, because they were identified only as "An Armenian".

Many of the contributors reported what they heard; very few reported what they saw. Seven documents this is really is amazing -seven documents were forwarded by the Dashnak party, the sworn enemies of the l Ottomans. This was the party of revolutionaries who were most responsible for the rebellion in Van, the ones who had attempted to take that area and many other areas from the Turks and the Muslims and those who persecuted the Muslims of the East. Other articles were provided by newspapers, including Dashnak and other newspapers sympathetic to the Armenian Cause. Documents were alsa forwarded by Armenian political representatives. Describing all these people as X, Y, and Z hides much. Many of the authors were unknown. For many others, only the name of the one who had forwarded the quotation, such as an American Consul, were known. Toynbee did not know who had actually written it One source, known to Toynbee only as the wife of an American missionary, was a woman who had never left her mission station. She was reported as a "refugee." Now, where she was a refugee from i am not sure. Maybe she had left her husband once. I do not know.

Toynbee wrote to Bryce, "I do not know the real authorship of thirty-four, twenty-three percent, of the documents". But these unknown writers appeared in the book in exactly the same way as the known. I must add that Toynbee did indeed try to find who these people were. He wrote to Barton trying to and the names of sources Barton had forwarded. Barton said he did not know. Not only did he not have the names, he had never seen the originalletters and did not know how he could get them. Where Barton did give so me information it of ten was sketchy: "it is written by a citizen of a friendly power". "A statement forward ed by a United States consul", "Statement by an American official unnamed".

Rockwell, the man who was the lead propagandist, wrote that he had himself published many of the stories he had forwarded to Toynbee. He had no idea who the authors of some of the stories were, but they seemed like good stories. Favre did the same thing. He knew some identities, not others. The Dashnak Party, when asked ab0l1t the statements they had forwarded, said they did not know the identities of any of the respondents. None of them. Of course Toynbee used them all anyway. He didn't know their identities, so he called them A,B,C, "A Traveler," whatever, and he used them all.

This is the book that has been brought into the House of Lords as an honest representation of what happened in World War One. Now, excuse me if I become upset when I think of these things. It is astounding. The maior problem is not that so much of what was written was untrue. The major problem is that the other side was never told. No Turk ever died; no Armenian ever killed. No mention of ChettE bands, of Armenian members of Ottornan Parliament joining Russians and leading armed bands against Turks, of murders of Ottoman officials, of cutting of Attornan supply and communications lines, of attempts to capture Attornan citjes, of mass murder in Van, of the forced migration of more than a million Muslims forced to flee by the Russians and Armenians. Yet Bryce stated, "AII possible sources were seen."

As intended, the propaganda was most effectiye in America. The British had destroyed the cable from Germany to America, and so only very unsatisfactory radio communication, which was in its infaney at the time, could bring out the German si de of the story. The British censors controlled all the news that was sent to the United States. Newspapers sympathetic to Germany were punished by not letting their reporters go to the front, by keeping news from them and giving it to their opponents. And so even the Chicago Tribune and other anti-British papers eventually came around. The German and the Attornan side were simply never heard.

The amazing thing is there was an extensive British propaganda machine in the United States which was never known by the public during the war. Sir Gilbert Parker, a Canadian who had been an MP in England and who wrote romantic novels, was a gentleman well known in America. He had married a rich American and lived in the United States. Parker ran the British propaganda organization in the United States. It was always a secret, although it was obviously well-known to the United States government. It distributed materials all over the United States. All were forward ed as if they had been sent by private citizens, never by the British government. How many people were fooled'? We will never know, but it is definitely true that no one ever published the fact that there was a propaganda bureau in America or that Parker had anything to do with it. That information only came out long af ter the war was over.

Parker himself wrote to the Foreign Office: "In fact we have an organization extraordinarily widespread in the United States, but which does not know it is an organization. It is worked entirely by personal association and inspired by yoluntery effort, which has grown more enthusiastic and pronounced with the passage of time. Finally, it should be noticed that no attack has been made upon us in any quarter of the United States, and that in the eyes of the American people the quiet and subterranean nature of our work has the appearance of a purely private patriotism and enterprise."

By 1917 Parker had one hundred and seventy thousand addresses in his book. A hundred and seventy thousand people to whom he was sending material. Obviously, he wasn't sending it all himself. He was sending to people who se nt to people who se nt to peeple. The material was passed on.

Table Five: Distinguished American Recipients of Wellington House Publications Distributed in the United States
Public Men generally 1847
Scientific Men 1446
Lawyers, etc. 1445
Y.M.C.A. Officials 830
Senators and Representative 680
Libraries 619
Newspapers 555
College Presidents 339
Financirs 262
Bishops 250
Historical Societies 214
Law Schools 166
Clubs 108
Judges 81
State Superintendents of Public
Instruction 35
Distinguished Men (for distribution) 585
Others and Miscellaneous 2212

We have, unfortunately, very little good information on his activities, but we do have some information. The table was drawn from one notice from Parker, sent to the Foreign Office in July, 1916. These were the important people to whom he sent propaganda. "Public Men Generally" probably included anyone with "The Honorable" in front of their name. Note the scientific men, lawyers, YMCA officials, senators, representatives, libraries, newspapers. Down the list you have "Distinguished Men for Distribution". In other words, distinguished friends who would give the propaganda to other peeple. "Others and Miscellaneous," twenty two hundred and twelve. This is a limited list, but it is interesting that it covers the "Who's Who" in American society. These publications were primarily directed against Germans, but quite a few of the materials that were sent were propaganda against the Turks.

It has to be remembered that missionary propaganda was going very strong at the time. The greatest effect against the Turks undoubtedly came from missionary propaganda. But in the United States the fact that the British propaganda appeared as well was very important, because the two supported each other. Again and again, in the missionary propaganda against the Turks in the United States you see statements such as, "You can tell that what we say is true because our old friend, Ambassador Bryce, agrees with us". The two propagandas fed on each other, when in fact they, were mainly drawn from the same sources, primarily the missionaries. Most of the records have been destroyed, but we do know that five hundred and fifty five American newspapers were sent materials from the propaganda office. We know that the missionary organizations alsa distributed this material. In fact, at one point the missionaries had a problem because three thousand copies of the Blue Book had been sent from Wellington House to the American missionary organization, three thousand copies, but American customs held them. Customs said the missionaries could not distribute them unless they paid duty. The American government intervened and ardered the books be jet through without payment. The missionaries distributed them. Toynbee gaye a list of newspapers to the American missionary Relief Committee, a list of newspapers to which they were to send the book as if it was their own idea. Toynbee even provided press releases they could copy, reviews that they could send, prewritten, to publish in American newspapers. The Secretary of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Charles Vickery, wrote Toynbee that he had distributed books "to 200 others that do not chance to be on your list. i am endeavoring to see that every editer and molder of public opinion in the country has a copy."

Parker had distributed fifteen thousand copies of this book to prominent Americans. Now we do not know what the deals were made with publishers. We know the Blue Book was reprinted in America, we know that many of these books, almost all the books that are on that originallist given above, were printed in both Britain and in the United States, some by an American company that was owned by the British publisher MacMillan. Wellington house articles were surely published in American newspapers. However, the records have been destrered. We will probably never know what deals were made.

I am running out of time, but i want to be sure to tell you one thing, and that is that it is important to note that both Toynbee and Bryce believed that what they were doing was right. i have no question but they indeed believed the Turks had slaughtered Armenians. They surely believed that what they were doing was Iying and exaggerating in the general service of the ultimate truth and in the service of their country. They lied, as theYýadmitted this themselves in their writings. But it was war. Such things were and are accepted in war.

The strange thing is that Wellington House had distributed similar, in some cases almost identical, propaganda against the Germans. As you know, not jang af ter the war the Wellington House campaign against the Germans was studied, described, and often censured by scholars. In fact Bryce and Toynbee together had written a very similar but shorter book about so-called German Atrocities in Belgium. That book contained the same sert of thing see n in the Armenian Blue Book: "X, Y, and Z" and unknown and fraudulent sources. After the war, the Belgians investigated and found that the book was al most completely lies. The Belgians had wanted it to be true, but they reported their findings accurately. Yet no one has looked into the propaganda directed against the Turks. After all these years, no one has decried this propaganda. If one reads the basic books on the British Propaganda Ministry, and there are quite a few books on the subject, they never discuss the campaign against the Turks, only the Germans. I believe the reason that no one has researched the topic and uncoveredcthe lies told of the Turks is that no one cared. They were just Turks.

Table Six: Books Recommended in Today's Bibliographies.

E.F. Benson, Crescent and Iren Cross
E.F. Benson, Deutschland ,her Allah
Fa'iz EI-Ghusein, "Bedouin Notable of Damascus" [sic], Martyred Armenia
J. Lepsius, Germany, Turkey, and Armenia: Seledions of Documentary Evidence
AP. Hacobian, Armenia and the War
Esther Mugerditchian, From Turkish Toils
Martin Niepage, The Horrors of Aleppo
Harry Stuermer, Two War Years in Constantinople
Arnold J. Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: the Murder of aNation
Arnold J. Toynbee, ed., The Treatment of Armenians in the Attornan Empire, 7975- 7 9 76 Arnold J. Toynbee, Turkey, A Past and a Future
Arnold J. Toynbee, The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks

Source: Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust

Today the books that I have described to you are stili recommended to American school children and university students. Theyare stili a basic element of school histories and advocacy by Armenian scholars. The table is a list of the Wellington House books that were particularly on the Armenians. Every one of these books except one is in the standard bibliography of Armenian History published by Professor Richard Hovannisian. The onlyone that is not is the book by Benson, Deutschland .ber \Allah, perhaps because of the provocative title. Every other one, including Toynbee's books and the imaginary Ghusein, are recommended. I challenge you to read those books and not say, "My God, how cou/d anyone write this?" Yet these are stili the sources recommended to American and, I expect, British students. By no means have the products of World War i British propaganda disappeared. Indeed, the Blue Book, The Armenian Atrocities the Murder of aNation has just been reprinted and celebrated in a book signing in the House of Lords. There is areason this book has been reprinted and the reason is not scholarship.

World War One propaganda from Wellington House and from the missionaries is routinely reprinted and quoted. In the United States, World War i propaganda is accepted as true in Congress. It is obviously alsa accepted in the French Parliament. It appears in high circles of state along with other fabrications, such as the spurious quote from Adolf Hitler (implying that Adolf Hitler was an expert on Armenian history). Even the Turkish Republic for many years was quiet on the Armenian Issue. It did not say a word, did not oppose these lies. The Turks were afraid, with some justification, of Turkish irredentism and of calls for revenge for what had been done to the T urks. They wished the T urks to resign themselves to living in Anatolia, forget pa st injuries and the lands that had been lost, and get about the business of building a new home. Only in the last twenty years has this history began to be truly studied in Turkey, and there are stili very few people that are locking into it.

Very few have opposed the continued propaganda against the Turks. The lies that were told during wartime have had half a centuryand more to incubate. Now theyare the accepted wisdom. Everyone thinks they know what the T urks did. In fact, what they know is what the British Propaganda Ministry and the missionary propagandists wanted them to believe. Those of us, whether historians or not, who care that the truth be known have a duty to try to right this historic wrong, to make sure that the propaganda of jang ago finally dies in dur own time.

Thank you
Justin McCarthy

**Big K** · 20 May 07, 17:39

QUOTATIONS BY NON-TURKISH WRITERS AND SCHOLARS REGARDING THE ARMENIAN QUESTION

Demir Delen

PART 1

In their tireless propaganda efforts, Armenian activists resort to proven forgeries and distortions so that they can show the world, they were the innocent victims of a so-called genocide. The quotations below, all by non-Turkish authors, historians and politicians demonstrate clearly that, far from being innocent victims, Armenians actively participated in the First World War on the side of the Ottoman Empire's enemies and caused unspeakable atrocities against the Turkish population.

Truth never seems to be a hindrance for Armenian activists in pursuit of their political goals. When they needed the help of the western world, they claimed more Armenians were killed than their entire population. However, they brought all the claimed dead back to life in order to show how populous Armenians were in eastern Anatolia, to the victors of the First World War, during the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Sevrés, so that they could substantiate their demand that an independent Armenian State must be established!

The following quotations from non-Turkish sources are categorized under three headings:
1. Armenian Revolutionary Bands and Atrocities
2. Armenian Propaganda
3. Armenian Cooperation with Russia and the Allies, against the Ottoman Empire.

1. ARMENIAN REVOLUTIONARY BANDS AND ATROCITIES:
1.1 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, Berkeley 1963:
The programme of the Dashnaksutiun Party (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) was drafted during the General Congress in 1892. The methods to be used by the revolutionary bands organized by the Party were as follows:
a. To propagandize for the principles of the Dashnaksutiun and its objectives based on an understanding of, and in sympathy with, the revolutionary work.
b. To organize fighting bands, to work with them with regard to the above-mentioned issues and to prepare them for activity.
c. To use every means, by word and deed, to arouse the revolutionary activity and spirit of the people.
d. To use every means to arm the people.
e. To organize revolutionary committees and establish strong links between them.
f. To stimulate fighting and to terrorize government officials, informers, traitors, usurers and every kind of exploiter.
g. To organize financial districts.
h. To protect the peaceful people and the inhabitants against attacks by brigands.
i. To establish communications for the transportation of men and arms.
j. To expose government establishments to looting and destruction (p. 168).

1.2 Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliph's Last Heritage, London 1915:
As for the tactics of the revolutionaries, anything more fiendish one could not imagine - The assassination of Moslems in order to bring about the punishment of innocent men, the midnight extortion of money from villages which have just paid their taxes by day, the murder of persons who refuse to contribute to their collection boxes, are only some of the crimes of which Moslems, Catholics and Gregorians accuse them with no uncertain voice. The Armenian revolutionaries prefer to plunder their co-religionists to giving battle to their enemies; the anarchists of Constantinople throw bombs with the intention of provoking a massacre of their fellow-countrymen.

If the object of English philanthropists and the roving brigands (who are the active agents of revolution) is to subject the bulk of eastern provinces to the tender mercies of an Armenian oligarchy, then I cannot entirely condemn the fanatic outbreaks of the Moslems or the repressive measures of the Turkish Government. On the other hand, if the object of the Armenians is to secure equality before law and the maintenance of security and peace in the countries partly inhabited by Armenians, then I can only say that their methods are not those calculated to achieve success (p. 409).

1.3 William A. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, New York, 1960:
Revolutionary placards were being posted in the cities and there were not a few cases of the blackmailing of wealthy Armenians, who were forced to contribute to the cause. Europeans in Turkey were agreed that the immediate aim of the agitators was to incite disorder, bring about inhuman reprisals and so provoke the intervention of the powers. For that reason, it was said, they operated by preference in areas where the Armenians were in a hopeless minority, so that reprisals would be certain. One of the revolutionaries told Dr. Hamlin, the founder of Robert College, that the Hunchak bands would "watch their opportunity to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages, and then make their escape into the mountains. The enraged Moslems will then rise, and fall upon the defenseless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarity that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilization and take possession". When the horrified missionary denounced the scheme as atrocious and infernal beyond anything ever known, he received this reply: "It appears so to you, no doubt; but we Armenians have determined to be free. Europe listened to the Bulgarian horrors and made Bulgaria free. She will listen to our cry when it goes up in the shrieks and blood of millions of women and children. We shall do it" (p. 157).

1.4 Sydney Whitman, Turkish Memories, London 1914:
Shortly after the news had spread to Europe of the attack on the Ottoman Bank and the subsequent massacre of Armenians, a number of artists of illustrated newspapers arrived in Constantinople, commissioned to supply the demand for atrocities of the Million-headed-Tyrant. Among these was the late Mr. Melton Prior, the renowned war correspondent. He was a man of strenuous and determined temperament, one not accustomed to be the sport of circumstances but to rise superior to them. Whether he was called upon to take part in a forced march or to face a mad Mullah, he invariable held his own and came off victorious. But in this particular case, as he confided to me, he was in an awkward predicament. The public at home had heard of nameless atrocities and was anxious to receive pictorial representations of these. The difficulty was how to supply them with what they wanted, as the dead Armenians had been buried and no women or children had suffered hurt and no Armenian church had be!
en desecrated. As an old admirer of the Turks and as an honest man, he declined to invent what he had not witnessed. But others were not equally scrupulous. I subsequently saw an Italian illustrated newspaper containing harrowing pictures of women and children being massacred in a church. (p. 29)

"Do you believe that any massacres would have taken place if no Armenian revolutionaries had come into the country and incited the Armenian population to rebellion?" I asked Mr. Graves (The British Consul).

"Certainly not" he replied. "I do not believe that a single Armenian would have been killed". (p. 70)

1.5 Sir Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, London 1915:
Under such circumstances the revolt of a handful of Armenians had not a chance of success and was therefore unjustifiable. As a friend to the Armenians, revolt seemed to me purely mischievous. Some of the extremists declared that while they recognized that hundreds of innocent persons suffered from each of these attempts, they could provoke a big massacre which would bring in foreign intervention. Such intervention was useless so long as Russia was hostile. Lord Salisbury had publicly declared that as he could not get a fleet over the Taurus mountains he did not see how England could help the Armenians, much as he sympathized with them (p. 155).

1.6 C.F. Dixon-Johnson, The Armenians, Blackburn 1916:
The advent of these revolutionary agents into Kurdistan had the inevitable result of embittering the former good relations of the Turkish Government and the resident Moslem population with the Christians and especially the Orthodox Armenian section of the inhabitants. This was natural for the reason that in Turkey the people have a horror of secret societies and plots, founded on the experience of their own suffering at the hands of the Greek Hetairia and the Bulgarian Komitadjis. The fears of the Turks and the Kurds were genuine. They believed that the members of the once loyal 'millet-i sadika' (the loyal nation) no longer merited the title and that they were arming and preparing to massacre the Moslems. The whole country became like a powder magazine (p. 24).

1.7 Clair Price, The Rebirth of Turkey, New York 1923:
Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun..Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalties of those who remained, removed them from the combatant force and formed them into labour gangs.

In April, Lord Bryce and the "Friends of Armenia" in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers and Russia also was presumable not uninterested in them.These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals late in April and having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May 1919. The rumour immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.

By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarikamis was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take widespread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken (pages 86-87).

1.8 Felix Valyi, Revolutions in Islam, London 1925:
In April the Armenian revolutionaries seized the town of Van, established an Armenian "General Staff" there under the command of Aram and Vardan, which delivered up the town to the Russian troops on the 6th of May, after having freed the district of Van from Mohammedans.

Amongst the most notorious of the Armenian chiefs was Karekin Pastermadjian, a former member of the Turkish Parliament , known by the name of 'Garo' who put himself at the head of the Armenian volunteers at the time of the opening of hostilities between Turkey and Russia and the Turks accuse him of having set fire to all the Mussulman villages he found on his way and of massacring their inhabitants. It is known that the attempts made by Turkey to win the support of the "Dashnakzoutioun" party against Russia at the beginning of the war were repulsed in the month of September 1914, by the Armenian Congress at Erzurum, which declared itself 'neutral'. Nevertheless, the thousands of Russian bombs and muskets which were found in the hands of its members prove what this neutrality meant. And indeed the Turks attribute the Russian invasion of the north of Asia Minor to the behaviour of the Armenian bands whose attitude made the defence of the country exceedingly difficult (pages 233-234).

1.9 Niles, Emory and Sutherland, Arthur, U.S. 867.00/1005, Princeton, 11 October 1919:
(Captain Emory Niles and Mr. Arthur Sutherland were Americans ordered by the United States Government in 1919 to investigate the situation in eastern Anatolia.)

In the entire region from Bitlis through Van to Bayezit we were informed that the damage and destruction had been done by the Armenians, who, after the Russians retired, remained in occupation of the country and who, when the Turkish army advanced, destroyed everything belonging to the Musulmans. Moreover, the Armenians are accused of having committed murder, rape arson and horrible atrocities of every description upon the Musulman population. At first we were most incredulous of these stories, but we finally came to believe them, since the testimony was absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by material evidence. For instance, the only quarters left at all intact in the cities of Bitlis and Van are the Armenian quarters, as was evidenced by churches and inscriptions on the houses, while the Musulman quarters were completely destroyed. Villages said to have been Armenian were still standing whereas Musulman villages were completely destroyed.

1.10 McCarthy, Justin, Death and Exile, The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821-1922, The Darwin Press Inc., 1995:
In the provinces in which the war was primarily fought-Van, Bitlis and Erzurum-at least 40 percent of the Muslims were dead at war's end. Of course Muslims were not the only ones to die. The Armenian death rate was at least as great and Armenian losses cannot be ignored. But the world has long known of the suffering of Armenians. It is time for the world to also consider the suffering of the Muslims of the east and the horror that it was. Like the Armenians, Muslims were massacred or died from starvation and disease in stupefying numbers. Like the Armenians their deaths deserve remembrance.

1.11 General Bronsart, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 July 1921:
As demonstrated by the innumerable declarations, provocative pamphlets, weapons, ammunition, explosives etc., found in areas inhabited by Armenians, the rebellion was prepared for a long time, organized, strengthened and financed by Russia. Information was received on time in Istanbul about an Armenian assassination attempt directed at high ranking state officials and officers.

Since all Muslims capable of bearing arms were in the Turkish army, it was easy to organize a terrible massacre by the Armenians against defenceless people, because the Armenians were not only attacking the sides and rear of the Eastern Army paralyzed at the front by the Russians, but were attacking the Muslim folk in the region as well. The Armenian atrocities which I have witnessed were far worse than the so-called Turkish brutality.

PART 2

2. ARMENIAN PROPAGANDA
2.1 C.F. Dixon-Johnson, The Armenians, Blackburn 1916:
We have no hesitation in repeating that these stories of wholesale massacre have been circulated with the distinct objective of influencing, detrimentally to Turkey, the future policy of the British Government when the time of settlement shall arrive. No apology, therefore, is needed for honestly endeavouring to show how a nation with whom we were closely allied for many years and which possesses the same faith as millions of our fellow-subjects, has been condemned for perpetrating horrible excesses against humanity on 'evidence' which, when absolutely false, is grossly and shamefully exaggerated (p. 61).

2.2 David G. Hogarth, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, New York, 1896:
The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone. The Porte knows very well that while Armenian Christians are Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, each sect bitterly intolerant of the others and moreover while commerce and usury are all in Armenian hands, it can divide and rule secure; but behind the Armenian secret societies (and there are few Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies at some point of their lives) it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or looking west, it espies through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the agitators Exeter Hall and Armenian Committees. The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize because he represses and so the vicious circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as administrator oppress? So far we have heard one version only, one part to this suit, with its stories of outrage and echoing through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the Moslem.

In my own experience of western Armenia, extending more or less over four years up to 1894, I have seen no signs of a Reign of Terror. Life in Christian villages has not shown itself outwardly to me as being very different from life in the villages of Islam, nor the trade and property of Armenians in towns to be less secure than those of Moslems. There was tension, there was friction, there was a condition of mutual suspicion as to which Armenians have said to me again and again "If only the patriots would leave us to trade and to till!". The Turk rules by right of five hundred years' possession, and before his day the Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman preceded each other as over-lords of Greater Armenia back to the misty days of the first Tigranes. The Turk claims certain rights in this matter - the right to safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets' nests as Zeitun, which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of Eastern Taurus, t!he right to remain dominant by all means not outrageous (p. 147).

2.3 E. Alexander Powell, The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia, New York, 1925:
Atrocity stories have been vastly overdone; some of the more recent massacres have been wholly nonexistent. One of the local (Constantinople) members of the press and of a relief organization told some friends openly that he could only send anti-Turkish dispatches to America because that is what gets the money.

2.4 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time, New York 1928
A circular was issued by the War Office inviting reports on war incidents from officers with regard to the enemy and stating that strict accuracy was not essential so long as there was inherent probability (p 20).

Atrocity lies were the most popular of all, especially in this country and America; no war can be without them. Slander of the enemy is esteemed a patriotic duty (p 22).

It is impossible to describe all the types of atrocity stories. They were repeated for days in brochures, posters, letters and speeches. Renowned persons, who otherwise would be hesitant to condemn even their mortal enemies for lack of evidence, did not hesitate to accuse an entire nation of having committed every imaginable savagery and inhuman action (p. 129).

2.5 Lamsa, George M., The Secret of the Near East, Philadelphia, 1923:
In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses, it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university destroyed, and the bishop killed. It is a well-known fact that even in the last war the native Christians, despite the Turkish cautions, armed themselves and fought on the side of the Allies. In these conflicts, they were not idle, but they were well supplied with artillery, machine guns and inflicted heavy losses on their enemies (page 133).

2.6 Prime Minister Millerand, Archives des Affaires Etrangeres de France, Vol 9, Folio 3:
I am surprised that London should possess information which no one here is aware of and is unable to document. As a result, it has been impossible until now to determine exactly that Armenians have been massacred in any area. There is much talk about it but no one was able to give me certain and exact information. In particular the Armenian losses in Marash appear to be absolutely false. Apparently, the Armenians took part in the struggle of our troops in this city and had casualties like all the fighters. A serious study of the figures shows that these Armenian casualties do not exceed 1000.
2.7 Clair Price, The Rebirth of Turkey, New York 1923:
By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief's representatives in Ankara (Angora), compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the Near East Relief's headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Izmir (Smyrna) (p. 189).

2.8 L. Evans, United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914-1924, Baltimore 1965:
Quoting from the American High Commissioner Admiral Bristol's report: "The United States should raise its voice against the plans of the Allies and the American people should be told the facts. They (the Turks) were still human and still had rights and the other side of the coin was obscured by the flood of Greek and Armenian propaganda painting the Turks as completely inhuman and undeserving of any consideration, while suppressing all the facts in favor of the Turks." (page 272)

2.9 Migirdic Agop, The Turkish Armenians, Istanbul 1922:
The Turkish Armenian does not know what a revolution is. He fears a revolution like death. But if there is something he is more afraid of, it is the revolutionary Armenian, the unreasoning revolutionary Armenians without a conscience who dragged him from misery to misery for several years with the thought of doing a good deed for him.

The Turkish Armenian have to confess that this enemy of their own kind has been everywhere and has done its work everywhere. It also had many followers in Russia, England and Turkey. Because it is known as a social truth that divisive movements and propaganda among groups in a society influence the masses very deeply. When these witless wretches came up with the idea of establishing a large state with the Armenians in Caucasia and Turkey, the God-fearing Armenians with good conscience who were aware of where the best interests of the nation lay, were overcome with sadness: 'An independent state, which will also include within its borders some of the Turkish provinces, is that it? This would be the destruction of Armenians' they said.
This was the truth.! It was impossible for any Armenian with a little bit of discernment not to see it. Because these people were thinking that they could change the bed of a large river with eight or ten pieces of stone.

This large river had opened its real bed by flowing for centuries on a strong surface. To change this direction was to tear Armenian interests from the tranquil flow of the river, to push them to draught-ridden lands and to strangle them there for ever. Those feeble minded persons failed to see that the foreigners who supported their revolution and evil deeds and championed their causes in their newspapers did not undertake such action for the love of Armenians. The aim, and the sole aim of these so-called protective powers was to cause the shedding of blood in regions which they earmarked for their hegemony and to take over these regions with the pretext of cleaning the blood.

History is still recording what imperialism is capable of doing in places it sets its eyes on. But it was impossible to make the public-spirited revolutionaries comprehend this. The anarchists and propagandists among them who could be useful neither to themselves nor to their communities in any other way were receiving salaries. They were also receiving what they conceived to be pledges. Overwhelmed under these condition, they believed there was Turkish oppression, and they also made their compatriots believe in their lies.

The last quarter of a century of Turkey's history is filled with some Armenian events. Although these events were supposedly aimed at some goals harmful to Turkey, in fact they were only the oppression of Armenians by Armenians. If the causes and reasons for each event are analyzed one by one and if the events are analyzed meticulously, the only conclusion that will be arrived at is the one we have stated in the previous sentence; the oppression of Armenians by Armenians.

PART 3

3.1 K.S. Papazian, Patriotism Perverted, Boston 1934:
When the world war broke out in Europe, the Turks began feverish preparations for joining hands with the Germans. In August 1914 the young Turks asked the Dashnag Convention, then in session in Erzurum, to carry out their old agreement of 1907 and start an uprising among the Armenians of the Caucasus against the Russian government. The Dashnagtzoutune refused to do this and gave assurance that in the event of war between Russia and Turkey, they would support Turkey as loyal citizens. On the other hand, they could not be held responsible for the Russian Armenians..The fact remains, however, that the leaders of the Turkish-Armenian section of the Dashnagtzoutune did not carry out their promise of loyalty to the Turkish cause when the Turks entered the war. The Dashnagtzoutune in the Caucasus had the upper hand. They were swayed in their actions by the interests of the Russian government and disregarded entirely, the political dangers that the war had created for the Armenian!s in Turkey. Prudence was thrown to the winds; even the decision of their own convention of Erzurum was forgotten and a call was sent for Armenian volunteers to fight the Turks on the Caucasus front (p. 37).

3.2 Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, New York 1926, (English translation by Muna Lee):
After hostilities had actually commenced, the Deputy to the Assembly for Erzurum, Garo Pasdermichian passed over with almost all the Armenian troops and officers of the Third Army to the Russians; to return with them soon after burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all of the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands. These bloody excesses had as their necessary corollary the immediate disarmament by the Ottoman authorities of the gendarmes and other Armenian soldiers who still remained in the army (probably because they had been unable to escape) and the utilization of their labour in the construction of highways and in carrying provisions back and forth across the mountains. The altogether unjustifiable desertion of the Armenian troops, united to the outrages they committed afterwards, on their return, in the sectors of Bashkaleh, Serail and Bayacet, did not fail to alarm the Turks and rouse their fear lest the rest of the Armenian population in the frontier provinces of Van and Erzurum revolt likewise and attack them with the sword. This indeed is precisely what happened a few weeks after my coming, when the Armenians of the vilayet of Van rose en masse against our expeditionary army in Persia; thus giving rise to bloody and terrible occurrences which, under the circumstances, might have been foreseen (p. 45).

3.3 Hovhannes Katchaznouni, The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) Has Nothing to Do Anymore, Bucharest 1923, (translated from the original by Matthew A. Callender):
(Mr. Katchaznouni was the first prime minister of the Independent Armenia).

In the beginning of fall 1914, when Turkey had not yet entered the war but was preparing to, Armenian volunteer groups began to be organized with great zeal and pomp in Trans-Caucasia. In spite of the decision taken a few weeks before at the General Committee in Erzurum, the Dashnagtzoutune actively helped the organization of the aforementioned groups and especially arming them against Turkey..There is no point in asking today whether our volunteers should have been in the foreground. Historical events have a logic of their own. In the fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer groups were formed and fought against the Turks. The opposite could not have happened, because for approximately twenty years the Armenian community was fed a certain and inevitable psychology. This state of mind had to manifest itself and it happened.

3.4 Philippe de Zara, Mustapha Kemal, Dictateur, Paris 1936:
After having accomplished the minimum of their duty as Ottoman citizens, the Armenians began to encourage the activities of the enemy. Their ambiguous attitude had certainly little to do with loyalty. But which Westerner would have the right to accuse them when traditions taught by Europe made the insubordination of the Sultan's Christian subjects the most sacred of obligations. An insubordination which was often sanctioned by giving autonomy, if not sovereignty. Nevertheless, how can anybody deny that in the opinion of the Turks, according to the law of all the states, the conduct of the Armenians facilitating during the war the task of the adversary, van be recognized as anything but a crime of high treason?..The Armenian committees, divided among themselves for internal issues, were often in agreement to facilitate the advance of the Russian armies; they were attempting to obstruct the retreat of Turkish troops, to stop the convoys of provisions, to form bands of francs!-tireurs. Mass desertions took place in the Eastern provinces; Armenians thus formed many troops officered by Russian officers. Here and there local revolts occurred. The leaders were setting the examples; two Armenian deputies fled to Russia. A literature of hatred was recalled. "Let the Turkish mothers cry..Lets make the Turk taste a little grief". The culpability of Armenians leaves no doubt (page 159).

3.5 Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,Cambridge University Press, 1977, Volume II:
Armenians again flooded the czarist armies, and the czar returned to St. Petersburg confident that the day finally had come for him to reach Istanbul. Hostilities were opened by Russians, who pushed across the border on November 1, 1914, though the Ottomans stopped them and pushed them back a few days later. A subsequent Russian counter offensive in January caused the Ottoman army to scatter and the way was prepared for a new Russian push into eastern Anatolia, to be accompanied by an open Armenian revolt against the sultan. Armenian leaders in Russia now declared their open support of the enemy and there seemed no other alternative. It would be impossible to determine which of the Armenians would remain loyal and which would follow the appeals of their leaders. As soon as the spring came, then, in mid-May 1915 orders were issued to evacuate the entire Armenian population from the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum, to get them away from all areas where they might under!mine the Ottoman campaigns against Russia or against the British in Egypt, with arrangements made to settle them in towns and camps in the Mosul area of Northern Iraq. In addition, Armenians residing in the countryside (but not in the cities) of the Cilician districts as well as those of north Syria were to be sent to central Syria for the same reason. Specific instructions were issued for the army to protect the Armenians against nomadic attacks and to provide them with sufficient food and other supplies to meet their needs during the march and after they were settled. Warnings were sent to the Ottoman military commanders to make certain that neither the Kurds nor any other Muslims used the situation to gain vengeance for the long years of Armenian terrorism. The Armenians were to be protected and cared for until they returned to their homes after the war (page 315).

3.6 Boghos Nubar, Letter to Times of London, dated January 30, 1919:
(Mr. Nubar was the head of the Armenian National Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference held by the victors of the WWI)

The Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, de facto belligerents - since they fought alongside the Allies on all fronts - in Palestine and Syria, where the Armenian volunteers, recruited by the Armenian National Delegation at the request of the French government, made up more than half of the French contingent. In the Caucasus, where, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the Imperial Russian Army, more than 40,000 of their volunteers offered resistance to the Turkish Armies.

3.7 Lieutenant Colonel T. Williams (Labour Party M.P.), Parliamentary Debates (Commons), London 25.ii.1924, vol. 170:
The Armenians were very well treated for hundreds of years by the Turks, until Russia, in the first place, started using them as pawns for purely political purposes; they exploited them as Christians, solely as pawns.

3.8 A. H Arslanian, British Wartime Pledges, 1917-1918: The Armenian Case, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, 1978:
British promises to Armenians were exactly like their promises to Arabs in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia; they were made with the purpose of encouraging the war efforts of the Armenians, to influence neutral states in favor of England and to excite the separatist tendencies in ethnic minorities under the rule of these neutral states so as to make their enemy, the Ottoman Empire, collapse from the inside (page 522).

3.9 Lord Curzon, PRO, FO. 800/151, 6.xii.1921:
I think Armenians know that among the Great Powers, Her Majesty's Government have always been their best friend and most loyal supporters..But you cannot expect this country - or any other one - to choose any area in Turkey, to chase away from there all other races, to increase the Armenian population there under the shadow of British bayonets, and to thus organize a national Armenian existence there with exorbitant taxes to be extracted from the British people. Even the thought of it cannot go beyond being a raw fancy.

**Big K** · 20 May 07, 17:41

ARMENIAN FORGERIES AND FALSIFICATIONS

Demir Delen

The truth behind some well-known and often-repeated forgeries by Armenian activists who are attempting to sway the world opinion regarding the existence of a "genoeide" in 1915, are exposed in the following paragraphs.

1. Hitler's quotation regarding the Armenians - A myth

Every year Armenian activists lobby politicians in Canada and the U.S. to prodaim a "genocide remembrance week" in April recognizing the so-called Armenian genocide. Every politician who speaks in favour of such a motion inevitably refers to the following statement, given to the m by the Armenian activists who daim it was moda by Hitler; "Who, af ter all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians".

This so-called Hitler statement is accepted as a "historical fact" and has been quoted by numerous politicians who support the Armenian couse, in parliamentary debates in North America. It also appears routinely in Armenian propaganda publications.

The Armenians want to play on the sentiments of the Jewish Holocaust and purport that Adolf Hitler moda this quotation in a speech regarding his planned annihilation of the European Jews. One of the most frequently utilized falsifications by Armenian spokesmen is that Hitler felt justified in going forward with his plan to exterminate European Jewry during the Second World War, because he was encouraged that the world had not reacted to allaged Ottoman mistreatment of its Armenian population during the First World War.

The problem with this linkage is that there is no proof that Hitler ever moda such a statement. It is claimed that he referred to the Armenians in the mannar cited above, while delivering a secret talk to members of his General Staff, a week prior to his attack on Poland. However, there is no reference to the Armenians in the original texts of the two Hitler speeches delivered on August 22, 1939, published as the offieial texts in the reliable Nuremberg documents.

It is natural to assuma that Hitler spoke to his generals on that day in his and their natiye tongue, German. The Nuremberg documents are the only authoritative and authentic sources. However, a few English translations that appeared in New York Times and London Times in 1945 carried an additional sentence in Hitler's speech that does not occur in the authorized German texts.

At the Nuremberg tribunal there were three authentic versions of the records of the Hitler's meeting with his generals, although no officici minutes exist. All three versions are similar in content. William lo Shirer in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" states as follows:

"At Nuremberg there was some doubt about a fourth account of Hitler's speech listed as N.D. C-3. and though it was referred to in the proceedings, the prosecution did not submit it in evidence. White it undoubtedly rings true, it may have been embeffished a little by persons who were not present at the meeting at the Berghof".

In several publications Armenian activists refer to the fabricated Hitler statement about Armenians and quote it as "exhibit US-28 of the Nuremberg Tribunal" to mislead the unsuspecting public as if it were authentic and credible. They obviously fail to indicate that exhibit US-28 was not introduced as evidence by the prosecution because of lock of proof of its authenticity and was not preserved in the records of the trials. This is the record Shirer refers to as being "embellished by persons who were not presant at the meeting at the Berghof". Neither of the two versions of the records introduced as evidence in Nuremberg nor the notes kept by General Franz Halder who was present at the meeting, contain any reference to Armenians.

This quotation, and indeed an entire text of a Hitler speech purportedly made at Obersalzberg on August 22, 1939, was first published in 1942 in a book entitled "What About Germany?" authored by Louis Lochner.

Lochner cited an unnamed informant as his source for a document called "Contents of Speech to the Supreme Commanders, and Commanding Generals, Obersalzberg, August 22, 1939". He further stated that he obtained a copy of this speech one week prior to Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland. This "document", the origin of which has never been diselosed, investigated, and much less established, is the sole source of Hitler's purported remark regarding the Armenians.

It is interesting to note that, in Lochner's unnamed informant's documents, there is not a single direct or implied reference to the Jewish reorle. The statement referred to Hitler's impending invasion of Poland and to the fate he envisioned for its citizenry; it had absolutely nothing to do with his plans for the Jews of Europe.

The Nuremberg transcripts, however, elearly demonstrate that the tribunal rejected Lochner's version of Hitler's Obersalzberg speech in favor of two more official versions found in confiscated German militery records. These two records are, respectively, the detailed notes of the August 22, 1939 meeting taken down by Admiral Hermann Boehm, Chief of the High Seas Fleet, who was in attendance (Document No. 798-PS) and a memorandum in two parts which provides a detailed account of Hitler's August 22, 1939, remarks at Obersalzberg (Document No. 1014-PS).

This second document originated in the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces files and was captured by American troops at Saalfelden in Austria. This was the chief document introduced by the prosecution at Nuremberg as evidence in the course of the session concerned with the invasion of Poland.

These two versions are in fact preserved in the transcripts of the Nuremberg Tribunal and are internally consistent with each other regarding the wording of Hitler's Obersalzberg speech. It is important to note that none of these eyewitness versions contain ant reference whatsoever to Armenians.

In addition, a third eyewitness account of the Obersalzberg meetings is found in the detailed diary kept by General Franz Halder. His notes, which were not submitted as evidence at the Nuremberg Tribunal, also do not contain any reference to Armenians.

A story in the Times of London on November 24, 1945 based on a "Ieaked document" on the assumption that it would be introduced as evidence by the time the story broke, made reference to the Armenians in Hitler's statement. The document which was provided to the prosecution by "an American newspaperman", is the source of the alleged Hitler statement on Armenians. However, this document was not introduced as evidence, after the original minutes of the Obersalzberg meeting were found.

The results of the erroneous Times of London story were far reaching. The world has been misled by Armenians since then, info thinking that the Nuremberg transcripts contained the quote attributed to Hitleri "Who stili speaks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians"? Armenian spokesmen have been free to argue that Adolf Hitler justified his planned annihilation of the Jews on the world's failure to react to the alleged Attornan genocide of the Armenians during the First World War.

In truth, no document containing the purported Hitler statement on the Armenians was introduced or accepted as evidence in the course of the Nuremberg trials. The Nuremberg transcripts through their preservation of Document Numbers 798-PS and 1O14-PS and the notes of Admiral Boehm, demonstrate that the a/leged statement is conspicuously absent from Hitler's remarks. The assertion that Hitler made a reference to the Armenians in ant context whatsoever is completely without foundation.

Yet Prof. Richard Hovannisian and a host of other Armenian spokesmen have been planting this statement into the minds of Canadian and U.S politicians during the last two decades. A significant portion of Armenian propaganda efforts has been devoted to establishing a linkage between their own historical experiences and those of European Jewry during the Second World War. The cornerstona in their case has long been the spurious Hitler quote, "Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?"

For a detailed analysis of the Nuremberg Trials records regarding this false statement that is attributed to Hitler, please refer to "The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians" by Prof. Heath W. Lowry, Political Communication and Persuasion, Volume 3, Number 2, 1985.

2. Talat Pasha Telegrams - A forgery

The Attornan Empire fought, in the First World War on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente Powers- England, France, Russia and their allies. During the War, as part of standard war propaganda, Ottomans were being accused of massacres against the Armenians who were assisting the Russians, the same way as'ftheir wartime ally the Germans were being accused of atrocities against the Belgians.

After the Treaty of Lauseanne in 1923, the Armenians realized that an independent Armenia promised to them by their allies for their efforts against the Ottomans during the First World War, was now a failed dream. They started a large propaganda campaign against the newly formed Republic of Turkeyand after the Second World War they cashed-in on the word "genocide". The intention was to draw a parallel between the fate of the Armenians in the First World War and Hitler's extermination policies towards the Jewish people.

The Armenian propaganda daiming genocide, required proof that a decision to exterminate the Armenians was made by the Attornan Government as a policy. The reason for this was that, the definition of the word "genocide" approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948, required that there had to be an intant of destroying anational, ethnic, racial or religious group. For this purpose Armenians produced a number of telegrams attributed to Talat Pasha, the Minister of Interior of the Attornan Government, supposedly found by the British forcas under the command of General Alienby, when they captured Aleppo in 1918.

The basis of the accusations against the Ottomans was a book written by an Armenian, Aram Andonian in 1920, "The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportations and Massacres of Armenians". Mr. Andonian published his book simultaneously in London, Paris and Boston - in English, French and Armenian. Ever since then, these "documents" have formed the backbone and the basis of all Armenian accusations against the Ottomans and later against the Turks.

It has been provan by scholars for quite some time now that these "documents" were fabricated. The originals of the papers copied by Andonian were never sean. When the British Foreign Office enquired about them at the War Office and with General Allenby himsaýf, it was discovered that they had not been found by the British Army, but rather had been produced by an Armenian Group in Paris. Not a single one of these "important" documents reproduced by Andonian in his book, can be found today.

Andonian made so many mistakas in preparing the papers, however, that it is possible to prove with absolute certainty that they were forgeries, eyan without the originals. Scholars and historians demonstrated that they did not resemble the Attornan administratiye documents neither in form, reference numbers, script nor phraseology.

The simplest, absolutely irrefutable proof of the forgery involves Andonian's incorrect use of calandar information. Naturally, for his forgeries Andonian used the Rumi calandar which was in use in the Attornan Empire at the time. Because this calendar's starting point is the year 622 AD. and uses the lunar years,

there are some complicated technicalities in converting between the Gregorian and the Rumi calendars. The analysis of the "documents" reveal that the forger simply knew too little about the Attornan calendar and overlooked the tricky details in converting. As a result, the forger reaches some impossible and humorous conclusions.

In one of his forged documents, Mr. Andonian dates a note and signature attributed to Mustafa Abdulhalik Bey, purported to be the Governor of Aleppo. A comparison with authentic carrespondenge between the Governor of Aleppo and the Ministry of the Interior in Istanbul, on the date in question, reveals that the Governor of Aleppo on that date was Bekir Sami Bey. In his attempt to prove massacres, Mr. Andonian, due to his lack of knowledge of the tricky technicalities in the conversion between the two calendars, was having Mustafa Abdulhalik Bey signing documents as the Governor of Aleppo while he was stili in Istanbul, before he was even appointed to the position.

Erich Feigl, in his book entitled "A Myth of Terror - Armenian Extremism: Its Couses and Its Historical Context", published in 1986, outlines in great technical detail all the crude forgeries concocted by Mr. Andonianýand his associates, on the so-called "Talat Pasha Telegrams".

For decades, Armenian activists referred to these fabricated "documents" as evidence, in their attempt to persuade the politicians and the public erinian in the west regarding their claim of an Armenian genceide.

Af ter the First World War the Attornan Capital was under Allied occupation and all State Archives were easily accessible to the British Authorities in Istanbul. If there were any witnesses or any kind of evidenge regarding the Attornan Government's involvement in any alleged Armenian massacres, they could have been easily found. The British High Commissian was unable to forward to london any legal evidence.

The meticulous search conducted by the British for 30 months with an utmost zeal to vindicate the Armenian allegations produced nothing. From a political standpojnt, it was highly desirable for the British Government that at least some of the Turkish deportees to Malta should have been brought to trial. The British Foreign Office left no stone unturned in order to prove that the so-called Armenian massacres actually taek place. Yet all efforts and zeal in this regard ended with a complete failure. There was no evidence, no reliable witness, no proof and no case!

3. Photographs of Human Skulls - A Distortion

For severol decades various Armenian publications have featured a photograph of a pyramid of human skulls which they alleged belonged to Armenian victims of Turkish massacres during the First World War. In most cases the date of 1915 - 1917 was explicitly stated in the legend underneath.

It has been published on the cover of a book with the Attornan Minister of the Interior Talat Pasha's photograph inserted on the upper left corner, announcing in the inner pages that the cover photogroph shows "Turkish barbarism". The same photograph was enlarged and shown to the Canadian public in the 1970's, in the Yerevan Payillian at the annual Metro International Carovan festivities in Toronto, as proof of "Armenian genocide".

In reality, this was a photograph of a painting entitled "The Apotheosis of War", created in 1872 by a Russian master called Vassili Vereshchagin (1842-1904), which hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The canvas, the subject of which has got nothing to do with the Armenians, was painted 43 years before the alleged massacres. It was used fraudulently and freely by the Armenians, as a tool to deceive and convince the public into believing their unfounded allegations about a "so-called genocide".

The purpose of this deceitful manipulation was to create a false impression in the minds of those who observe the photo arrangements. It was designed to insult the Turkish people while serving the political objectives of Armenian activists.

4. H. Morgenthau and Admiral Mark L. Bristol

Admiral Mark lambert Bristol served as the Commander of the U.S. Naval Detachment in Turkish waters and as the U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey during the years 1919-1927. In this capacity he witnessed firs! hand; the Turkish War of Independence, the formation of the First Turkish Republic and the early years of its existence.

His papers, which are housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, reveel in great detail the character of political, military, social, and economk conditions in Anatolia during the turbulent period of post World War i.

The following is an excerpt from Bristol's letter dated March 28, 1921 to Dr. James L. Barton, the Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions:

"I see that reports are being freely circulated in the United States that the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in the Coucasus. Such reports are repeated so many times it makes my blood bo il.

The Near East Relief have the reports from Yarrow and our own American people which show that such Armenian reports are absolutely false. The circulation of such false reports in the United States, without refutation, is an outrage and is certainly do ing the Armenians more harm than good. I feel that we should discourage the Armenians in this kind of work, not only because it is wrong, but because theyare iniuring themselves.

In addition to the reports from our own American Relief workers that were in Kars and Alexandrople, and reports from such men as Yarrow, I have reports from my own Intelligence Officer and know that the Armenian reports are not true. Is there not something that you and the Near East Relief Committee can do to stop the circulation of such false reports?

I was surprised to see Dr. McCallum sen d through areport along this line from Constantinople. When I called attention to the report, it was stated that it came from the Armenians, but the telegram did not state this, nor did it state that the Armenian reports were not confirmed by our own reports. I may be all wrong; but I can't heir feeling that I am not, because so many people out here who know the conditions agree with me that the Armenians and ourselves who lend ourselves to such exaggerated reports are doing the worst thing we possibly can for the Armenians. "

The letter continues:
"While the Dashnaks were in power they did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling by affacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars; by committing outrages against the Moslems; by giving no representation whatever to the Molokans which are a large factor in the population of the Caucasus Armenia; by massacring the Moslems; and robbing and destroying their homes; and finally by starting an attack against the Turks which resulted in a counter attack by the Turks... The acts of the Armenian army at Kars absolutely disgusted our Americans, including Yarrow".

Because of his objective observations and remarks, Admiral Mark Bristol was frequently attacked and discredited by Armenian and Greek spokesman as "anti-Armenian", "anti-Greek," and "pro-Turkish". For this reason, it is very rare to find any mention of Admiral Bristol in any Armenian publication. Instead they are full of quotations by Mr. Henry Morgenthau who was his predecessor in Istanbul.

Prof. Heath W. lowry, in his artiele entitled "American Observers in Anatolia CA. 1920: The Bristol Papers" states as follows:

"Morgenthau was a confirmed 'Turcophobe' whose hatred for the Turks was matched only by his unabashed support for the Christian minorities under Ottoman rule. To anyone sharing Morgenthau's preiudices(induding the minorities themselves), Bristol's evenhanded objectivity could only be interpreted as 'proTurkish'...Bristol's insistence on the equality of Christian and Moslem alike, marked o drastic change from Morgenthau's championing of the Christian element. it is this fact which accounts for his being incorrectly labeled as 'pro-Turkish' and 'anti-minority'."

Armenian spokesman consistently refer to H. Morgenthau's statements as proof, in their pursuit to convince the politicians that a so-called genoeide occurred. In his tenure, Mr. Morgenthau has never left Istanbul and his only source of information was the Armenian Patriarchate.

George A. Schreiner was a distinguished foreign correspondent who had served in Turkey from February until the end of December 1915. The following excerpts are from his letter dated December ll, 1918 written to H. Morgenthau, expressing strong disagreement with the views set forth in his book "Ambassador Morgenthau's Storey" which is frequently referred to by Armenian activists:

"In the interesj of truth / will 0150 affirm that you saw little of the cruelty you fasten upon the Turks. Besides that, you have killed more Armenians than ever lived in the districts of the uprising. The fate of those people was sad enough without having to be exaggerated as you have done. / have probably seen more of the Armenian affair than all the Armenian affaches of the American embassy together... To be perfectly frank with you, / cannot applaud your efforts to make the Turk the worst being on earth and the German worse, if that be possible". (FOR: HMS-Box No. 12: Schreiner to Morgenthau leffer of Oecember ll, 1918).

Peter Michael Buzanski is the author of a full-Iength study on Bristol's tenure in Turkey, entitled: "Admiral Mark lo Bristol and Turkish-American Relations, 1919-1922". He presents an analysis of Bristol devoid of rhetoric and argues convincingly that Bristol should not be judged from the "standpoint of the American Committee for Armenian Independence". Buzanski concludes that Bristol must be evaluated in terms of the manner in which he represented the interests of the nation which he served. On this account he gives Bristol high marks.

**zraver** · 21 May 07, 17:38

it was a mass force dpopulation expsulsion resutlign in the deaths of however mnay and the destruction of an ancient culture aide, abetted and organized by the ottoman goverment and witnessed by multiple nuetrals and NGO's who had no reason lie. The only real question is the number of dead. Turkey cannot dodge its responsability on this issue. Nor should she be forgiven for decades of mistreatment and current malfeasence towards Armenia. keeping Turkey cut off from the EU until the scales are balanced is more than fair, and thats not even considering the Kurdish issue, or the issue surrounding the failure of the Turkish Goverment to fullfill its promises vis a vis Hagia Sophia.

**Big K** · 21 May 07, 18:28

Originally Posted by zraver

it was a mass force dpopulation expsulsion resutlign in the deaths of however mnay and the destruction of an ancient culture aide, abetted and organized by the ottoman goverment and witnessed by multiple nuetrals and NGO's who had no reason lie. The only real question is the number of dead. Turkey cannot dodge its responsability on this issue. Nor should she be forgiven for decades of mistreatment and current malfeasence towards Armenia. keeping Turkey cut off from the EU until the scales are balanced is more than fair, and thats not even considering the Kurdish issue, or the issue surrounding the failure of the Turkish Goverment to fullfill its promises vis a vis Hagia Sophia.

http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/his...tml#post375560

**Simullacrum** · 25 Jun 07, 22:50

Originally Posted by Big K

http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/his...tml#post375560

Who gives a rats arse about the Turkish Empire, in terms of world contribution, and to human mankind, what has turkey done and given..?? It is of an irrelevent scale compared to THE great Empires such as...Greeks, Romans, British to name a few.
A turk is more renowned, for being of babaric nature and stature. From Armenians,..to the execution of Greeks in thrace, and to the handeling of current day kurds.

you are decendents of a nomadic tribe coming from mongolia, and through conquest, butchery,genocide, thugary...you have attained modern day Turkey.
What you call modern day Turkey, was in habitated by greeks long before you came in. Greeks inahbitaed asia minor 3000 years before you set foot into Asia Minor. Hell even your historicall sites and in the South and western part of Turkey are Greek..!!

These stupid..one sided ignorant/bigoted post are a waste of space in these forums.!
You live in your little world, with your own versions of what occured in History.

**astralis** · 25 Jun 07, 22:58

simullacrum,

These stupid..one sided ignorant/bigoted post are a waste of space in these forums.!

gee, you just called an entire group of people barbaric insignificant savages...so i dare say your own post wasn't much better.

**crooks** · 25 Jun 07, 23:11

Propaganda happens to everyone in a war, no point moaning about it, and it's certainly not a "Turkish" thing.

It's not as if Turks have ever been oppressed or anything, though you certainly done a great job oppressing certain other people.

**Simullacrum** · 25 Jun 07, 23:21

Originally Posted by astralis

simullacrum,

gee, you just called an entire group of people barbaric insignificant savages...so i dare say your own post wasn't much better.

I should of worded it differentely, Im afraid that is there History, that is what the forged through time and in the history books, that is undinable
Im not saying it is just a Turkish thing, cause all cultures to some extent have done the same.

But it is infuriating that they deny all that, and that there are of some great nation, and the sun shines out of there backsides. It is annoying to say the least, going over and over the same drivle.

I can say that my nation is great, but i can also see for what it is, and has done in past, including its attrociteis, I am man enough to say the good with the bad.... our Turkish poster in these forums cannot do the same, and that is what is anoying. There justification in Genocide or that it did not exist is what is anoying.!

it is like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denieying in the holocaust....absolute lunacy.!

**astralis** · 26 Jun 07, 00:29

simullacrum,

fair enough! unfortunately too much of the world don't think along the same lines, unfortunately....

**xerxes** · 26 Jun 07, 04:51