From the March 1919 issue of The New Armenia

By ARSHAG MAHDESIAN

THE death of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt has deprived the Armenian nation of one of its most illustrious and sincere friends. As his book, The Strenuous Life, proves, Colonel Roosevelt long ago had interested himself in the Armenians. On September 28, 1904, he received most cordially, at the White House, an Armenian delegation, which, representing the Armenian Catholicos, had come to this country to enlist the sympathy and assistance of the United States in relieving the Armenians from Turkish persecution. During this reception, Mr. James Bronson Reynolds, in his introductory speech for the Armenian delegation, said: “Since 1895 more men, women and children have been massacred in Armenia by the Turkish soldiers and their auxiliaries than were killed on both sides in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." *

Then, President Roosevelt, amiably interrupting him, rejoined: “You are quoting from my own book, The Strenuous Life. It was I who first made that statement.”

In his message to Congress in 1904, President Roosevelt declared that it was inevitable that the United States "should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishinef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been victims, and which has won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world."
On another occasion he declared: "Over and above all considerations of trade and polities we will continue to urge the claims of outraged humanity in the stricken land of Armenia."

Patriarch Khrimian

 In 1905, President Roosevelt received from His Holiness Mekrtich I. Khrimian, the late Catholicos of All the Armenians, a letter of congratulation upon his election. The communication, written in the ceremonial form used by Armenian rulers of the fifth century, read:
Mekrtich, Servant of Jesus Christ, and, by the inscrutable will of God, Chief Bishop and Catholicos of All the Armenians, Supreme Patriarch of the Mother See of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Armenia, to His Excellency, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, greeting and patriarchal benediction.

Your Excellency: God, Who in His providence, bestows grace and all good gifts abundantly upon the worthy, has verily given Your Excellency a large measure of His blessing, and has raised you to the high office for which you have proved yourself so worthy in the past.

I consider it a great privilege and pleasure to extend to Your Excellency the most sincere congratulations of myself and of the Church and the people I represent, on the happy occasion of your receiving, as the most worthy person to be their Chief Magistrate, the absolute confidence and approval of your great and enlightened people.

It is a source of great satisfaction to me when I consider the comparatively happy lot of those of my people who, having escaped the unbearable yoke of Turkish tyranny and oppression, have taken refuge in your glorious country, where while earning an honest livelihood, they are being, at the same time, elevated mentally and morally, sharing with all other citizens the full benefits of the freedom and civilization of the United States. Would to God that the remnant of my people could enjoy in their own country the same peace and quiet and the benefits of righteous laws, with due protection of life, honor and property.

I pray Your Excellency to accept my profound respects and heartfelt thanks for the very kind reception accorded to my delegates, the two Archbishops, who were commissioned to plead the cause of the suffering Armenian people in Turkey. I cherish the hope that the powerful voice of Your Excellency’s Government will eventually aid in bringing peace and justice to the people of unfortunate Armenia....

Fridtjof Nansen

Because of the strong sense of justice and righteousness President Roosevelt was known to possess, many appeals were made to him in behalf of Armenia. On January 18, 1906, Mr. James Bronson Reynolds presented to him a petition in which prominent European statesmen, educators, publicists and citizens, as Björnstjerne Björnson and Fridtjof Nansen, of Norway; General Booth, of the Salvation Army; Professor Wündt, of Leipzig; M. Berthelot, Professor Ernest Lavissc, Jules Claretic, Leon Bourgeois, Ludovic Halévy, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, and Louis Blanc, of France; and thirty-one senators and twenty-five deputies of France, two senators and eleven deputies of Italy, two senators and forty-seven deputies of Belgium, one deputy of Sweden, and eight deputies of Denmark, fourteen English bishops, fifty-one professors of the universities of Great Britain and the Continent, besides many eminent citizens of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Scotland, and Ireland, had joined to save from total annihilation “the Armenian people whose origin is the same as ours, and who have played an important part in the development of civilization since ancient times.”

At the same time, through the joint efforts of Armenia and The Friends of Armenia, many distinguished clergymen, educators, philanthropists, governors and mayors in all parts of the United States, adopted or endorsed resolutions supporting the cause of Armenia. In response to all these appeals, the Honorable Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, wrote:

The sympathy of the American people with the oppressed of every country has been repeatedly expressed by various branches of this Government * *, and in the case of the unfortunate Armenians, has been eloquently voiced by the American nation itself. There is no room for doubt in any quarter as to the desire of the President that these Armenians should possess the security of life and property which it has been the concerted aim of the European powers to assure to them. The sufferings of the Armenian subjects of Turkey cry aloud for remedy and redress. They shock the humanitarian sense of all mankind. . . . No right-minded man can witness such occurrences without craving the power to prevent them. I most sincerely wish that the United States had the power.

The non possumus attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward Armenia was diplomatically justified as the United States was not one of the signatory Powers which had guaranteed, in Artide LXI of the Treaty of Berlin, “amelioration and reforms” for the Armenian provinces then under the yoke of Turkey. Colonel Roosevelt was perhaps explaining his former official position as well as that of the United States when he said, in a letter dated July 10, 1918:

We had neither the power nor the right ourselves to begin a world war by our going to war with Turkey in the past, but .now the world war has come, and we are in it, now we can fight effectively beside our Allies. We have the only chance that has ever been offered to us to interfere by force of arms in entirely disinterested fashion for the oppressed nationalities that are ground under the Turkish rule. It is a dreadful thing that we should fail to take advantage of this opportunity, and it will be a lasting disgrace to our nation if we persist in the failure.

Owing to innumerable stories of the Armenian persecutions, Colonel Roosevelt was led to fear that the new generation of the Armenians had lost its martial prowess. During an interview granted by him to Armenian students in 1912, he said: "I want Armenians to be able to bear arms just as they did in the days of King Tigranes, so that in the next generation no one can say that the Christian population of Turkey cannot fight."

The devotion, gallantry and valor displayed by the Armenians during the war, their heroic sacrifices for the triumph of the Allies, were a cause of great satisfaction to Colonel Roosevelt; and, whenever an opportunity presented itself, he did not fail to plead for the independence of Armenia.

"I am doing everything I can, and shall continue to do everything I can for the Armenians," he wrote to a correspondent a few days before his lamented death; and it is reported that one of his last acts was the Signing of the petition which was circulated by The New Armenia to urge prompt action on Senator Lodge’s Resolution in favor of a United and Independent Armenia.

W hen the grateful citizens of the new Armenian republic come to honor the memory of their great friends, Theodore Roosevelt will be remembered among the first of those who nobly and effectively championed Armenia in her heroic struggle for independence!

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* It would take research to pin down how many died in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (this site claims a few thousand shy of 200,000), but here is an example of what happens when one listens to mindless propaganda instead of genuine history. Passionate pro-Armenians would have it upwards of 300,000 were "massacred" in the late 19th century, circa 1895-96. The fact is, the figure was closer to 20,000. (Around a tenth of the casualties of the Franco-Prussian War, if the above figure is correct.) While these fatalities occurred as a result of Armenian rebellion seeking European intervention, some 5,000 Muslims were killed at the hands of murderous Armenians, in order to get the Muslims incited... victims who are never referred to.

* * The sympathy of the American people certainly does not rest "with the oppressed of every country," but only with the victims deemed worthy enough; especially if they are Christian and white. See above paragraph for one example.

"The Strenuous Life" is the book Roosevelt had written in 1900; it is available online, at bartleby.com.

The following analysis is taken from "EXPANSION AND PEACE
PUBLISHED IN THE "INDEPENDENT," DECEMBER 21, 1899."

 

 Captain Mahan, than whom there is not in the country a man whom we can more appropriately designate by the fine and high phrase, "a Christian gentleman" ...

We begin to get a clue as to what sort of people are to be designated "fine and high."

The great blot upon European international morality in the closing decade of this century has been not a war, but the infamous peace kept by the joint action of the great powers, while Turkey inflicted the last horrors of butchery, torture, and outrage upon the men, women, and children of despairing Armenia. War was avoided; peace was kept; but what a peace! Infinitely greater human misery was inflicted during this peace than in the late wars of Germany with France, of Russia with Turkey; and this misery fell, not on armed men, but upon defenseless women and children, upon the gray-beard and the stripling no less than upon the head of the family; and it came, not in the mere form of death or imprisonment, but of tortures upon men, and, above all, upon women, too horrible to relate—tortures of which it is too terrible even to think. Moreover, no good resulted from the bloodshed and misery. Often this is the case in a war, but often it is not the case. The result of the last Turko-Russian war was an immense and permanent increase of happiness for Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. These provinces became independent or passed under the dominion of Austria, and the advantage that accrued to them because of this expansion of the domain of civilization at the expense of barbarism has been simply incalculable. This expansion produced peace, and put a stop to the ceaseless, grinding, bloody tyranny that had desolated the Balkans for so many centuries.

Note only the "happiness" of "Christian" lands matter. Who cares about how they obtained such "happiness," by inflicting wide-scale death and exile on the Muslims who were living side-by-side with them. (Some 260,000 were killed in Bulgaria alone, with twice that number having been exiled.) Even by 1900, Roosevelt had succumbed whole-heartedly to Armenian propaganda. Had he not the wisdom to scratch underneath the surface of the ubiquitous one-sided stories? Even if he had the wisdom, he did not have the desire... which ultimately indicates how  wise a person really is.

He goes on to criticize Tolstoy's "fantastic advocacy of peace":

If Tolstoi's countrymen had acted according to his moral theories they would now be extinct, and savages would have taken their place.

If Roosevelt had the wisdom and the ability to analyze objectively, he would have discovered the Ottoman Empire had followed a policy similarly advocating peace; the traditions, culture, and religion of peoples who had been conquered were kept intact for centuries... in a "fantastic" display of humanism, especially rare for multi-cultural empires of the period. As Roosevelt correctly deduced, the adherence to such morality and toleration came very close to resulting in the extinction of the Turks themselves, as Roosevelt's brand of "civilized" high and fine Christian folk attained the position of dictating post war terms. But to Roosevelt's mind, the suffering of Turks are to be deemed irrelevant:

If Russia had acted upon Tolstoi's philosophy, all its people would long ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and the country would now be occupied by wandering tribes of Tartar barbarians. The Armenian massacres are simply illustrations on a small scale of what would take place on the very largest scale if Tolstoi's principles became universal among civilized people.

The savages are the Turks. They are not equal human beings. Is this a "fine and high" CHRISTIAN way to think?

President Theodore Roosevelt

Again, peace may come only through war. There are men in our country who seemingly forget that at the outbreak of the Civil War the great cry raised by the opponents of the war was the cry for peace. One of the most amusing and most biting satires written by the friends of union and liberty during the Civil War was called the "New Gospel of Peace," in derision of this attitude. The men in our own country who, in the name of peace, have been encouraging Aguinaldo and his people to shoot down our soldiers in the Philippines might profit not a little if they would look back to the days of the bloody draft riots, which were deliberately incited in the name of peace and free speech, when the mob killed men and women in the streets and burned orphan children in the asylums as a protest against the war. Four years of bloody struggle with an armed foe, who was helped at every turn by the self-styled advocates of peace, were needed in order to restore the Union; but the result has been that the peace of this continent has been effectually assured. Had the short-sighted advocates of peace for the moment had their way, and secession become an actual fact, nothing could have prevented a repetition in North America of the devastating anarchic warfare that obtained for three quarters of a century in South America after the yoke of Spain was thrown off.

Some very interesting observations and beliefs are revealed by Roosevelt. In a way, he's not without a point when he declares the reality that peaceniks are no match for hostile, dogmatic aggressors who only have violence in mind. This is one of the reasons why the Armenian "Genocide" has become the accepted wisdom throughout the world. The genocide advocates are loud, immoral, aggressive, and often fanatical. They have been largely met (in the rare cases they have been met; mostly the counterforce has been indifference) with civility and reason, weapons that have proven hugely ineffective.

Note how he is defending American actions in the Philippines. (Why doesn't he mention what America was doing there in the first place, inflicting such death and destruction in a land where the USA did not belong? But to men like Roosevelt, it was America's "moral obligation" to tame the savages.)

And here we encounter another example of Roosevelt's "odious hypocrisy." Without going into reasons for the American Civil War (primarily economic, as the case with most wars; basically, the North wanted to control the rich lands of the South. The main reason was certainly not to "free the slaves"), he upholds a country's right to repress those who demand "secession." This was exactly what happened with the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (only the Armenians, unlike the American Confederacy, carried on a bloodthirsty policy of systematic extermination).

Note also his distaste for the "yoke" of Spain. Spanish influence was replaced by the dominance of another power, this time from the Americas.  He elaborates further:

...[W]e had just emerged victorious from our most righteous war with Spain. Scant attention is paid to the weakling or the coward who babbles of peace; but due heed is given to the strong man with sword girt on thigh who preaches peace, not from ignoble motives, not from fear or distrust of his own powers, but from a deep sense of moral obligation.

Yet one man's "moral obligation" could be another's disaster. Who determines the better morality? Those who carry the stronger sword.

The growth of peacefulness between nations, however, has been confined strictly to those that are civilized. It can only come when both parties to a possible quarrel feel the same spirit. With a barbarous nation peace is the exceptional condition. On the border between civilization and barbarism war is generally normal because it must be under the conditions of barbarism. Whether the barbarian be the Red Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the border of British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the Siberian Cossack, the result is the same. In the long run civilized man finds he can keep the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian will yield only to force, save in instances so exceptional that they may be disregarded. Back of the force must come fair dealing, if the peace is to be permanent. But without force fair dealing usually amounts to nothing. In our history we have had more trouble from the Indian tribes whom we pampered and petted than from those we wronged; and this has been true in Siberia, Hindustan, and Africa. .

Perhaps those Indian, Afghan and Turkoman barbarians were not stirring trouble for barbarity's sake, but for self-preservation against much stronger forces threatening their right to exist. Who is the real barbarian?

History has been "revised" in the United States to the extent that the "Red Indian" is no longer regarded as the savage villain. That is because the Red Indian has been subdued, and the victor finally could afford to offer "fair dealing." In the case of the Turks, the Western world still prefers to view these savages who are still peskily around as the ogres from The Lord of the Rings.

If the Ottoman Empire had followed Roosevelt's doctrine of wronging instead of pampering and petting, the face of Europe might have been different today.

Take the case of France and Algiers. During the early decades of the present century piracy of the most dreadful description was rife on the Mediterranean, and thousands of civilized men were yearly dragged into slavery by the Moorish pirates. A degrading peace was purchased by the civilized powers by the payment of tribute. Our own country was one among the tributary nations which thus paid blood-money to the Moslem bandits of the sea. We fought occasional battles with them; and so, on a larger scale, did the English. But peace did not follow, because the country was not occupied. Our last payment was made in 1830, and the reason it was the last was because in that year the French conquest of Algiers began. Foolish sentimentalists, like those who wrote little poems in favor of the Mahdists against the English, and who now write little essays in favor of Aguinaldo against the Americans, celebrated the Algerian freebooters as heroes who were striving for liberty against the invading French. But the French continued to do their work; France expanded over Algiers, and the result was that piracy on the Mediterranean came to an end, and Algiers has thriven as never before in its history.

Indeed, France's conquest of Algeria made the seas safer for American ships. In Roosevelt's criteria, only his own interests count. Certainly the advanced civilization of France brought certain advantages to a conquered Algeria, but only to the extent where France benefited. Algerian benefits were strictly a byproduct, so "Algiers has thriven as never before" is very misleading. The purpose of conquest was enrichment for the French, a goal that one such as Roosevelt, who only thinks of self-interest, can appreciate. No mention is made of the hundreds of thousands of Algerians who died as a result of French occupation, which some have classified as another unrecognized genocide. Why has it been unrecognized? Because the victims have been designated as half-human by the "Victors."

It's amusing how Roosevelt is incensed over sympathy expressed toward rebel Filipino forces. If you don't like it... get out of where you never belonged in the first place, and stop with the "moral obligation to civilize" taradiddle.

On an even larger scale the same thing is true of England and the Sudan. The expansion of England throughout the Nile valley has been an incalculable gain for civilization. Any one who reads the writings of the Austrian priests and laymen who were prisoners in the Sudan under the Mahdi will realize that when England crushed him and conquered the Sudan she conferred a priceless boon upon humanity and made the civilized world her debtor. Again, the same thing is true of the Russian advance in Asia. As in the Sudan the English conquest is followed by peace, and the endless massacres of the Mahdi are stopped forever, so the Russian conquest of the khanates of central Asia meant the cessation of the barbarous warfare under which Asian civilization had steadily withered away since the days of Jenghiz Khan, and the substitution in its place of the reign of peace and order. All civilization has been the gainer by the Russian advance, as it was the gainer by the advance of France in North Africa; as it has been the gainer by the advance of England in both Asia and Africa, both Canada and Australia.

I think we're getting an excellent idea of where Theodore Roosevelt is coming from, by now. Yeah, those Russians were civilized, all right. It was so nice of the Russians to go in maintain peace and order for the benefit of the half-human savages. Too bad the world did not allow the Russians to keep on conquering in the years ahead. Maybe America should have benefited from this wonderfully civilized Russian treatment, during the Cold War days.

While we had a frontier the chief feature of frontier life was the endless war between the settlers and the red men. Sometimes the immediate occasion for the war was to be found in the conduct of the whites and sometimes in that of the reds, but the ultimate cause was simply that we were in contact with a country held by savages or half-savages.

When an invader comes into your land and threatens your way of life or existence, it is the right of the land-owner to defend himself.

 Substitute "Turk" for the "red men." For the good of humanity, these savages must be subdued.

The same will be true of the Philippines. If the men who have counseled national degradation, national dishonor, by urging us to leave the Philippines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control of those islands, could have their way, we should merely turn them over to rapine and bloodshed until some stronger, manlier power stepped in to do the task we had shown ourselves fearful of performing. But, as it is, this country will keep the islands and will establish therein a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the world's surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace.

The Philippine people can obviously not be entrusted to rule their own lands which they had maintained for centuries (before the Spaniards moved in for a two-century stay). They are only capable of "rapine and bloodshed." I am not an expert on Philippine history, but you can bet the Philippines had the worst taste of rapine and bloodshed once the manly Western powers came in to try and rescue these savages from the forces of darkness.

He ends the chapter with:

It is only the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world. The Arab wrecked the civilization of the Mediterranean coasts, the Turk wrecked the civilization of southeastern Europe, and the Tatar desolated from China to Russia and to Persia, setting back the progress of the world for centuries, solely because the civilized nations opposed to them had lost the great fighting qualities, and, in becoming over peaceful, had lost the power of keeping peace with a strong hand. Their passing away marked the beginning of a period of chaotic barbarian warfare. Those whose memories are not so short as to have forgotten the defeat of the Greeks by the Turks, of the Italians by the Abyssinians, and the feeble campaigns waged by Spain against feeble Morocco, must realize that at the present moment the Mediterranean coasts would be overrun either by the Turks or by the Sudan Mahdists if these warlike barbarians had only to fear those southern European powers which have lost the fighting edge. Such a barbarian conquest would mean endless war; and the fact that nowadays the reverse takes place, and that the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.

Here's what Nick had to say about a later Greek adventure: "When George Horton, Christian missionary in Smyrna and a Turcophobe of no small distinction (author of “The Blight of Asia”), asked a Greek about reports of wholesale massacres carried out by Greeks against Turks in Western Anatolia during 1921-22, the answer that he got was that Greek actions were modeled after the punitive expeditions carried out by U.S. forces in the Philippines between 1899-1905."

It is the Muslims, and in particular the Turks/ and the Turkic Tatars, who hold Roosevelt's greatest wrath, "fine and high" Christian man that he was. In each of the conflicts he cites, it is not the "barbarians" who fired the first shot. When these people attempt to defend themselves against good, Christian Greek, Italian and Spanish aggression, they become "barbarians." The troubles (or the "endless war[s]" Roosevelt warned of) between the Western and the Islamic worlds today have all resulted from Western interference and aggression. Which of these Islamic nations have declared a war against a Western power in the past few centuries? Any aggression has stemmed from a sense of self-defense. That is not a defense of the awful Islamic terrorism going on today. But if these conflicts are to be remedied, one needs to understand what lies at the root of the conflict.

As an American, I'd take Western ways over the Islamic any day... so Roosevelt may not have had a monopoly on odious hypocrisy. But it's not the Islamic ways that I am defending; I am defending their right to live their lives the way they choose. If they become strong enough to impose their will, then would be the time to deal with them. The last few centuries, the ones who have been doing all the imposing have been the Christian West — and Israel — at the cost of much death and suffering upon the Muslim "half humans." "Barbarian Conquest" then becomes a relative term.