The third false antithesis, between civilisation and barbarism, is generally more picturesquely expressed. The Greeks ‘have Hellen the son of Deucalion to their father,’ while the ‘Unspeakable Turk’ is a ‘nomad from the steppes’ and shares the odium of the Scythian, the Mongol, and the Hun. This is the greatest nonsense of all. If it is a question of physical transmission, our Modern Greek contemporaries have about as little Hellenic blood in their veins as our Osmanli contemporaries have of nomadic. If it is one of spiritual heritage, I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated that the Hellenic civilisation of the Ancient Greeks and the Near Eastern civilisation of the Modern Greeks are totally distinct from one another; that we Westerners have as good a claim as any Near Easterners to be the true Hellens’ spiritual descendants; and that there is even a perceptible Hellenistic strain in the Osmanlis’ Middle Eastern culture.

The common statement that Ancient Greek literature was handed down to us by the Modern Greek refugees from the final wreck of the East Roman Empire in the fifteenth century, is inexact. The Modern Greeks did copy, preserve, and eventually sell to Western Connoisseurs the manuscripts of the Ancient authors. They also kept alive a knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of the Ancient language. But the part played by Modern Greeks in the revival of Classical Greek studies in Western Europe and America has been remarkably small. From the end of the fifteenth century onwards, the whole reconstruction and reinterpretation of the Greek Classics has been done by Western scholars. The Modern Greeks provided the texts and the linguistic key, but the most important qualifications of the Western Grecians were their previous familiarity with the Roman adaptations of Ancient Greek literature and their membership in a living society which rivalled the greatness of Hellas in her prime. Koraís, the great Modern Greek scholar who made the fruits of Western Classical scholarship accessible for the first time to any considerable number of his fellow-countrymen by editing the Classics with introductions and notes in the Modern Greek language, went as a young man to the French University of Montpellier to study medicine; was diverted from technology to scholarship under the influence of his Western professors; and spent the remaining forty-six years of a long life in Paris, where he found a more congenial atmosphere for Ancient Greek studies than on the classic soil of his native Smyrna.

It is worth noting that the differentiation of Near Eastern from Ancient Hellenic culture came about by a deliberate breach with the past, and not by a tearful parting. The Academy of Athens, founded by Plato, was not broken up by the Turks. It was closed, in the ninth century of its existence and just forty years before the first Turks visited Constantinople,[1] by Justinian, the Near Eastern sovereign who built Aya Sofía and who figures as a worthy in the legend of Modern Greek nationalism. Seven philosophers who refused to embrace the Christian religion took refuge in the dominions of Justinian’s Middle Eastern rival Khosru,[2] and the Persian Government stipulated for the repatriation and toleration of these last representatives of Hellenic culture in a treaty of peace with the East Roman Power.[3] The cult of the Olympian gods survived three centuries longer in the Mani, the most inaccessible promontory of the Morea, which was cut off from the East Roman Empire by the Slavonic migrations at the close of the sixth century. But in the latter part of the ninth century, when the Moreot Slavs had been reduced to subjection, this scandalous survival of Ancient Hellenic usages attracted the attention of the Constantinople Government. The Olympian cults of the Maniots were suppressed and the last taint of Hellenism was purged out of the Near Eastern world.[4] The repudiation of the Hellenic tradition had already been symbolized by a change in the use of names. ‘Hellene’ had come to mean a heathen outsider, in contrast to the Christian subject of the East Roman Empire. The latter was the orthodox pattern of the primitive Modern Greek, and Romyós, or ‘East Roman,’ as has been mentioned in Chapter IV., became the national name in the vernacular. The Modern Greek merchants and peasantry of the Ottoman Empire only learnt to call themselves Hellenes from the children of the French Revolution in the West, who delighted to speak of Switzerland as the Helvetian Republic and to have their portraits painted in the costume of Roman Senators. This classical affectation was a Western fashion which the Modern Greeks borrowed with other promiscuous properties of our puppet-show, just as the classical scholarship of Koraís was a part of his enlightened advocacy of Western culture among his fellow-countrymen.

There would be nothing more in this than the common-place mutual contempt of different trades, if the frontiers between nomad’s land and peasant’s land were stable. On his own ground, each of them is following that mode of life which the experience of generations has shown to be economically the most productive. He is in equilibrium with his environment and therefore more or less harmless and amiable. In fact, the nomad who visits the peasant or the peasant who visits the nomad at home is generally agreeably surprised at the courtesy of his reception. ‘Those splendid horse-dairy-farmers the Abioi, who live on a milk diet and are the justest of mankind,’ is the earliest reference to the Central Asian nomads that I know of in the literature of a sedentary society,[10] and if nomads were literary-minded, I daresay they would compliment us occasionally in equally gracious phraseology. The traditional bitterness between peasant and nomad arises from a physical cause for which neither is to blame. Their respective environments and the frontiers between them are subject to periodic change. Recent meteorological research indicates that there is a rhythmic alternation, possibly of world-wide incidence between periods of relative desiccation and humidity,[11] which causes alternate intrusions of peasants and nomads into one another’s spheres. When desiccation reaches a degree at which the steppe can no longer provide pasture for the quantity of cattle with which the nomads have stocked it, the herdsmen swerve from their beaten track of annual migration and invade the surrounding cultivated countries in search of food for their animals and themselves. On the other hand, when the climatic pendulum swings back and the next phase of humidity attains a point at which the steppe becomes capable of bearing cultivated roots and cereals, the peasant makes his counter-offensive upon the pastures of the nomad. Their respective methods of aggression are very dissimilar. The nomad’s outbreak is as sudden as a calvary charge, and shatters sedentary societies like the bursting of some high explosive. The peasant’s is an infantry advance. At each step he digs himself in with mattock or steam-plough, and secures his communications by building roads or railways. The most striking recorded examples of nomad explosion are the intrusions of the Turks and Mongols, which occurred in what was probably the last dry period but one.[12] An imposing instance of peasant encroachment is the subsequent eastward expansion of Russia. Both types of movement are abnormal, and each is extremely unpleasant for the party at whose expense it is made. But they are alike in being due to a single uncontrollable physical cause, and it is as erroneous to attribute its workings to human wickedness in the one case as in the other. Yet while the intrusive nomad has been stigmatized as an ogre, the intrusive peasant has either escaped observation or has been commended as an apostle of civilisation. The reasons for this partiality are clear. One is that the nomad’s tactics are more dramatic than the peasant’s and make a correspondingly greater impression on the imagination. The other is that history is written for and by the sedentary populations, which are much the most numerous and sophisticated portion of mankind, while the nomad usually suffers and pines away and disappears without telling his tale. Yet, if he did put it on record, he might paint us as monsters.

The best commentary on all this false history and false sentiment which prejudice the thoughts of the Western public about the Greeks and the Turks (on the rare occasions when it thinks about them at all) is the judgment of those Westerners who speak from personal experience. They are few in number, but they are mostly educated men, and the different vocations which have drawn them to the Near and Middle East enable them to see the situation from independent points of view. Some have gone as business men, others as soldiers, others as doctors, others as consuls, others as missionaries. Any point on which the majority of these diverse first-hand observers agree, cannot easily be dismissed as a delusion; yet they are almost unanimous [17] in the verdict that, as an individual human being in the local environment, the Turk is not the Greek’s inferior. They find him no less honest in his dealings, no less admirable in his character, and no less pleasant as a companion.

This consensus among Westerners who have had direct relations with both nationalities cannot possibly be the product of Turkish propaganda. In the first place, the people who hold this view have formed it as the result of experience; and, secondly, the Turks, as a nation, are almost ludicrously innocent of the propagandist’s art. The difference between Western and Middle Eastern social conventions has restricted those forms of personal contact on which propaganda (as well as the more reputable forms of self-revelation) largely depends. The revolution in the position of Turkish women, which has been in progress for the last ten years, is beginning to break this barrier down, but it is still there. In addition to this material obstacle, there are subjective inhibitions. The Turks are aware of the prejudice against them that exists in Western minds, and are inclined to despair of the possibility of overcoming it. This pessimism arises partly from discouraging experiences and partly from pride, for the Turks have not lost possession of their distinctive Middle Eastern civilisation. It may have been a failure; it may even be inherently inferior to that of the West, yet it is, after all, a system of life which is a law unto itself and has its own standards and ideals. The more the West displays contempt and aversion, the more it discourages the Middle East from the pursuit of a modus vivendi and impels it to retire into itself. If there is any question of propaganda, it is on the other side. This questionable art, which is unfortunately characteristic of Western culture (the very name having originated in the bosom of our greatest Western institution, the Roman Catholic Church) has been acquired by the Greeks with uncommon virtuosity. The Greek colonies in the principal urban centres of the Western world, with their intimate affiliations—through business, naturalisation, and intermarriage—with ‘influential circles’ of Western society, are admirably equipped for practising it. They will themselves be the first to admit that they have not neglected their opportunity. This is not to their discredit, but it does suggest that the influence of propaganda is to be traced in the second-hand opinions of the majority of the Western public that has stayed at home, rather than in the first-hand experience of the minority that has been in contact with the Greeks an the Turks in their native surroundings.

The natural explanation of this minority’s judgment is that it is correct, in so far as categorical judgments are applicable at all in a realm of relativity, where the positions of Greeks, Turks, and Westerners are changing all the time in respect of one another. If ‘suggestion’ plays any part, it is rather an ‘inverse suggestion’ set up by the false prejudice with which the Western observer on the spot has previously been indoctrinated. The mental associations of ‘Christianity,’ ‘Europe,’ and ‘Hellenism,’ which the Modern Greeks have taken such pains to attach to their own image in Western minds, are really prejudicial to them. Because (as I have tried to show) they do not correspond to the facts, they cause embarrassment as soon as Greeks and Westerners who have theoretically accepted them attempt to establish personal relations. Each finds himself in a false position. The Greek assumes a character which he does not possess. He poses as a scion of Ancient Hellenic society, who has rejoined his long-lost Western brother after an interval of adversity, due to the accident of a brutal barbarian conquest. The Westerner, on his side, starts from the generous assumption that the only essential difference between them consists in his own accidental better fortune, and that if the Greek bears the marks of what he has been through, it is only delicate to draw a veil over a temporary infirmity. From the moment of contact, however, these mutual assumptions begin to break down, and the process of disillusionment is so awkward, and sometimes even painful, for the Western party to the relationship that he tends to bring it to an end and to avoid its renewal. In fact, he often cherishes a quite unjust resentment against the Modern Greek, because the latter does not come up to expectations which he would never have entertained if he had exercised his judgment. It is not to the interest of either Greeks or Westerners that this source of misunderstanding should be perpetuated.

(Emphasis below is Holdwater's)


The Greek assumes a character which he does not possess. He poses as a scion of Ancient Hellenic society, who has rejoined his long-lost Western brother after an interval of adversity, due to the accident of a brutal barbarian conquest. The Westerner, on his side, starts from the generous assumption that the only essential difference between them consists in his own accidental better fortune, and that if the Greek bears the marks of what he has been through, it is only delicate to draw a veil over a temporary infirmity. From the moment of contact, however, these mutual assumptions begin to break down, and the process of disillusionment is so awkward, and sometimes even painful, for the Western party to the relationship that he tends to bring it to an end and to avoid its renewal. In fact, he often cherishes a quite unjust resentment against the Modern Greek, because the latter does not come up to expectations which he would never have entertained if he had exercised his judgment. It is not to the interest of either Greeks or Westerners that this source of misunderstanding should be perpetuated.

This phenomenon in the relationships between people of different civilisations is a commonplace in those between individuals of different classes in the same society. A cultivated class, for example, finds most difficulty in getting on with another which has acquired part—but only part—of its culture and customs, and which seeks on this account to establish the convention that no class-distinction is there, when both parties are secretly aware of its presence. On the other hand, it is comparatively at ease in its intercourse with members of one which makes no pretensions to similarity. In this relationship both parties can be themselves, and they can each enjoy the experience of discovering the other’s distinctive qualities, without the discomfort of detecting insincerity in his attitude and their own. Indeed, this relationship inclines people to be, if anything, unduly charitable. Each party having assumed that the other’s standards differ— and that legitimately—from his own, is easily led to suspend judgment. A working-man often makes allowances for an acquaintance who is a gentleman, and a gentleman for a working-man, which they would not either of them make undesirable as that noted above in the case of Westerners and Greeks; but it has the same psychological origins, and neither feature will disappear until the ‘complex’ of prejudice in Western minds has been removed.

It is imperative to remove it, for unwarrantable prejudice and unwarrantable indulgence do not in this case counter-balance one another. When you have made a spoilt-child of the Greek, it is no good rounding on him as an impostor; and when you have used the Turk as a whipping-boy, you do not heal the stripes that you have inflicted by congratulating him on his fortitude. Unnatural treatment is made doubly harmful by inconsistency in its application, and the deplorable effects of Western behaviour towards both nationalities are written large on the characters of the present generation. In both cases, the evil that we have done to them exceeds, and will probably outlive, the good.

It is not my intention to minimise the advantages which the Greeks—to consider them first—have derived from Western goodwill. Our sympathy has stimulated their efforts, our charitableness encouraged them to retrieve their mistakes, our exceptional disinterestedness and even generosity towards them has thrown open to them the highest career as a nation for which they may be qualified by their talents. When they took up arms for their independence and began to be worsted in an unequal struggle, Great Britain, France, and Russia agreed on intervention,1 and a few months afterwards the power of the Ottoman and Egyptian Governments to carry on the war was broken—‘accidentally on purpose’—by the Allied fleets at Navarino.2 Again, when state organisation had to be provided for the liberated Greek nation, Western statesmen bestowed on Greece, from the outset and on their own initiative, that ‘sovereign independence’ which they and their successors have always refused (in practice if not in theory) to Turkey. The demand for the realities of this status, formulated in Article 6 of the Turkish National Pact of 1920, 3 has been stigmatized as ridiculous and impertinent. On the other hand, the first point settled in a Protocol signed by the three Powers at London on the 3rd February 1830 was that ‘Greece shall form an independent state, and shall enjoy all the political, economic, and commercial rights attaching to complete independence.’ Yet, at that date, the Greeks had given no proof of capacity for self-government. They had fought two civil wars before they were half-way through their war against the Turks, squandered their Western loans, and generally ignored their Western advisers. The grant of sovereign independence in these circumstances was an act of faith on the part of Western statesmen, and if it has been justified by the event in Greece, they might be well advised to repeat the experiment for the benefit of Turkey.

At the same time, Greece has, on the whole, received greater injury than advantage from the Western attitude towards her during the first century of her independent existence. The general stimulus to her vitality and the concrete services rendered to her are outweighed by the demoralising effects upon her national character. We have encouraged her to be conceited and pharisaical—to over-estimate her own merits and achievements, and to ignore the qualities of the Turk (in spite of the fact that those qualities gave him the dominion over her for four centuries). Taking as their standard of comparison their respective degrees of Westernisation, the Greeks have learnt to regard the Turks as immeasurably their inferiors. They do not realise that their present relative positions, even in this respect, are only temporary; and having staked their fortunes on assimilation to the West, they do not suggest that, in the long run, it may prove no disadvantage to a non-Western people to have remained ‘radically alien to Western civilisation.’ In national conflicts, it is courting disaster to misconceive the potentialities of an adversary, and the Anatolian campaign, the history of which has been narrated in Chapter VI., is an illustration of the misfortunes which Greece has several times brought upon herself by this error of judgment. But the worst elements introduced into the Greek character by intercourse with the West have been the more impalpable weaknesses of superficiality and lack of originality. Having by our sympathy stimulated the Greeks to make efforts, we have often tempted them to relax them by premature and insincere commendation; and by placing our spiritual heritage unreservedly at their disposal, we have led them to turn their backs upon their own.

1 Treaty of the 6 th July 1827 for the Pacification of Greece.

2 On the 20 th October 1827.

3 See Text of the Turkish National Pact, pp. 207-10 above.

Holdwater: Regarding the emphasized passage in the paragraph above: does that not also perfectly describe the Armenians?

As much as Arnold Toynbee turned over a new leaf since his Wellington House days, he still could not let go of the idea of Turkish extermination efforts against the Armenians. Perhaps he was too deeply Christian, or perhaps he was a victim of auto-suggestion, after having drowned himself in so much propaganda; or perhaps he was in denial, having embarked on lies, in patriotic service to his nation. Whatever the reason or reasons, the following passage should be of great interest to those who believe the Ottoman government had the "intent" to kill off the Armenians, and yet have not come face to face with their sins; basically, Toynbee's explanation boils down to the fact that the Turks can only repent once the West can let go of its prejudice and hatred:


The Turks have been demoralised in a different way. Certainly we have avoided killing them by kindness, and if it is wholesome for the character never to be flattered or favoured and to be thrown upon one’s own resources, we have done them some negative service in this respect. In fact, the Turks have not only had the discipline of ‘self-help.’ As depositaries of the Caliphate and as the only even quasi-independent Power surviving in the Middle Eastern world, they have been looked up to by the other members of Middle Eastern society, and have had to shoulder some part of their burden in addition to their own immoderate load. This ordeal of acting as bulwarks against Western aggression might have been preferable to being made, like the Greeks, into protégés of the Western intelligentsia, if their Western adversaries had shown chivalry or had even played fair. But unhappily the record of the West in its dealings with Turkey has been not only ungenerous but unscrupulous...

But, as in the case of Greece, the concrete actions of Western Powers in war and diplomacy have mattered less, for good or evil, than the overwhelming though imponderable ‘suggestion’ exercised upon the Turkish by the Western mind. We have injured the Turks most by making them hopeless and embittered. Our skepticism has been so profound and our contempt so vehement, that they have almost ceased to regard it as possible to modify them by their own action. They incline to accept these Western attitudes as fixed stars in their horoscope, with a fatalism which we incorrectly attribute to the teaching of their religion, without realising that our own conduct has been one of its potent causes. But while they are discouraged, they are not deadened to resentment. They see us in a light in which we too seldom look at ourselves, as hypocrites who make self-righteous professions a cloak for unscrupulous practice; and their master-grievance against us so fills their minds that it leaves little room for self-examination. If a charge is brought against them from a Western source, that is almost enough in itself to make them harden their hearts against it, however just it may be. They do not get so far as to consider it on its merits. They plead ‘not guilty,’ and put themselves in a posture of defence, to meet what experience has led them to regard as one of the most effective strokes in the Western tactic of aggression. In 1921, I seldom found the Turks defend the fearful atrocities which they had committed six years previously against the Armenians, but repentance and shame for them were not uppermost in their minds—not, I believe, because they were incapable of these feelings, but because they were preoccupied by indignation at the conduct of the Allied Powers in fomenting a war-after-the-war in Anatolia. Remorse cannot easily co-exist with a grievance, and until we relieve the Turks of the one, we shall certainly fail, as we have done hitherto, to inspire them with the other.

In attempting to express and explain the Turkish point of view, I am not seeking to suggest that it is right, or to deny the charges brought against the Turkish nation and Government for their treatment of subject peoples during the past century. Their crimes are undoubtedly exaggerated in the popular Western denunciations, and the similar crimes committed by Near Eastern Christians in parallel situations are almost always passed over in silence. At the same time, the facts substantiated against the Turks (as well as against their neighbours) by authoritative investigation are so appalling that it is almost a matter of indifference, from the point of view of establishing a case, whether the embroideries of the propagandists are counterfeit or genuine. The point which I wish to make is that, if our aim is not simply to condemn but to cure, we can only modify the conduct of the Turks by altering their frame of mind, and that our only means of doing that is to change our own attitude towards them. So long as we mete out one measure to them, another to the Greeks, and yet a third to ourselves, we shall have no moral influence over them.

The following study has been written by a non-Turkish American who requested his identity be withheld.


Contents



Toynbee's "genocide" theory in 1922

Toynbee's articulation of the "genocide" theory.

Toynbee's ignorance of the extent of the Armenian Provocation

Discussion of the change of heart.

Toynbee's Comparison of Greek and Turkish Atrocities

Other topics related to the Armenians

Discussion of the Armenians of Cilicia and the French

Unreturned Armenian Refugees

Treatment of Minorities in Ottoman Turkey

Miscellaneous General-Interest Passages

Toynbee on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian Question

Toynbee's comments on War and World Order

Comments on War in general and on Armenians and Jews in particular

His comments on World Order





Toynbee's "genocide" theory in 1922

Toynbee's articulation of the "genocide" theory

Unfortunately Toynbee believed in the existence of a government plot or conspiracy to exterminate the Armenians - even after travelling to Turkey and realizing that his former assumptions about Turks had been incorrect. His argument on this subject rests on the assumption that there were irregular bands or volunteers ("chettes" in Turkish) who were often armed by the government and encouraged by them to do their dirty work. In his words, he says that they were "the principle instruments (though not the principal authors) of the organized atrocities on both sides". He makes a distinction between "economic" and "political" chettes arguing that the former had always existed while the latter were partly recruited from the former and:


"[T]hough their personal incentive was still loot, [they] were in quite other relations with the civil and military authorities of their respective nations. So far from discouraging them, the authorities armed them, organized them, and gave them a free hand to accomplish results which they desired to see accomplished but preferred not to obtain openly for themselves." After a discussion of the evolution and history of these "chettes" and their relations with the governments of the countries in which they operated, he states

"The Governments merely ceased to acknowledge the agents by whom their policies were carried out. The bands sent across the frontiers were ostensibly organised by revolutionary comittees, equipped by patriotic subscriptions, and recruited by self-sacrificing volunteers, and army officers exchanged their uniform for brigand fancy dress when they acted as leaders. Everybody knew these brigands had the backing of the states whose supposed interests their activities were intended to advance". "Turkish 'political' chettes made their debut in 1914 on the Western littoral and in 1915, after being reinforced by convicts released for the purpose from public prisons, they carried out the designs of the Union and Progress Government against the Armenians in every province of Anatolia except the vilayet of Aidin. The Armenian civil population was 'deported' from the villages and towns and marched off for 'internment' under the escort of uniformed gendarmes; but at the first point on their road out of range of Western observers, the chettes appeared and executed the massacre. The uniformed gendarmes arrived without their prisoners at their destination. What had happened? The chettes had waylaid them. It was unfortunate. The Ottoman Government, faithful to its tradition of clemency, had intended to deport the seditious Armenians instead of taking severer measures; but the chettes, though outlaws, were Osmanlis. Their patriotic indignation had been too strong for them, and their armament too strong for the gendarmes, so that the Government could not be blamed for the mishap to the Armenians. The make-belief was as inept as it was disgusting, yet it was felt to be worth while. These were the precedents for the organized atrocities of 1921. "

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 279 )



Note here that Toynbee's entire argument of a "genocide" rests on these "chettes" having been the agents of the government, that the government instigated the whole thing and had no sincere intention of safely relocating the Armenians. Furthermore - as can be seen below - he was unaware of the extent of Armenian Provocation before 1915.



In another passage, he is discussing how war brings out the most bestial qualities of man and he states: "There seems to be much evidence for this in the history of the French Revolution but the most signal modern instance was the attempt to exterminate the Armenians in 1915. In this case, hundreds of thousands of people were done to death and thousands turned into robbers and murderers by the administrative action of a few dozen criminals in control of the Ottoman Empire." Here Toynbee's footnote says "On this point see Blue Book Miscellaneous No. 31 1916 pp. 651-3"

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 265-6 )



Note here that he refers his readers -in a footnote- to the Blue Book. Note also that he accuses the government of carrying out a deliberate program of extermination.


Toynbee's ignorance of the extent of the Armenian Provocation

Evidence of Toynbee's ignorance of the true extent of the Armenian Provocation can be found on p. 276 of his 1922 book. The context is a discussion of the atrocities perpetrated by Turks and Greeks in Western Anatolia . He mentions the fact that often the excuse for the atrocities was that the destroyed villages had harbored rebel bands and then he mentions in passing that:

"…it is quite possible (as the Turks allege) there was similar provocation for the atrocities against the Armenians in 1915. …such provocation generally bears no proportion whatever to the reprisals taken for it… …in fact the provocations alleged generally turn out to be no more than welcome pretexts for the indulgence of covetousness and bestiality, and certainly this is the impression made by the evidence about the organized atrocities in the Anatolian War on either side".

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 276 )



This is significant because it betrays some uncertainty on Toynbee's part, of the circumstances leading up to the events of 1915 ("it is quite possible"). Note also that he justifies his ignorance by saying that the in most cases the so-called provocation is nothing more than an excuse ("pretext") for atrocities. Clearly he was jumping to conclusions regarding the Armenians based on what he had observed of the Greek-Turkish conflict in Western Anatolia . At this point we can identify two big problems with Toynbee's claims:

1. It became clear, years later that the provocation by the Armenians had indeed been much more serious than Toynbee imagined; there is a mountain of evidence to show this.

2. Toynbee's 1922 theory of the "chettes" being in alliance with the government has not withstood the test of time and it is now evident that his theory was entirely speculative. In all the evidence that has been uncovered since the 1920's we have mountains of proof to show that the existence of such a grand scheme by the government is quite impossible.


Discussion of the change of heart

Toynbee's biographer McNeil discusses Rosalind's reaction to the Greek excesses witnessed by the couple and Arnold's correspondence on the subject after witnessing it and the surprise with which this news was met back in England before their return since they "had been brought up on Gladstone's denunciation of the Turks, dating back to the 1870's and the well documented Armenian horrors of 1915-1916 [which] had reinforced the images of Turkish brutality".

( McNeil - "Arnold Toynbee - A Life" p107)


Toynbee's Comparison of Greek and Turkish Atrocities

After Toynbee traveled to Western Anatolia himself and witnessed with his own eyes what was happening in 1921, his attitude toward the Turks started to change from the attitude of the author of "the Blue Book". This passage is an example of how much that attitude was changing:

"In judging Greek and Turkish atrocities, Westerners have no right to be self-righteous. They can only commit one greater error of judgement, and that is to suppose that the Turks are more unrighteous than the Greeks. Much mischief has been done in the Near and Middle East by this common Western opinion. The argument generally advanced is that Turks have committed a very much greater number of atrocities upon Greeks than Greeks upon Turks since the two peoples first came across each other. The fact is true but the deduction is fallacious, because a second factor has to be taken into consideration, and that is the opportunities enjoyed by the two parties for respective ill-treatment." …Here he goes on to point out that the Greeks did not have the upper hand for nearly as long as the Turks did and he mentions the environment in which the clashes occurred pointing out that whenever they had the chance the Greeks perpetrated as much or more harm than Turks did in similar circumstances.



(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 269 )

Other topics related to the Armenians

Discussion of the Armenians of Cilicia and the French



Toynbee mentions the "…irresponsible policy of the French authorities, who tried at first to lessen the burden on their regular army by partly garrisoning Cilicia with Armenian Volunteers of the legion d'Orient. They even permitted the Armenians to raise irregular bands." …he then goes on to mention that it is possible or probable that the "Armenians took this opportunity to revenge themselves upon the local Turkish population for what they had suffered in 1915. The French, who exposed them to the temptation and afterwards allowed them to suffer for having yielded to it, have more to answer for.".

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 312 )


Unreturned Armenian Refugees


In his 1922 book, Toynbee mentions Armenian refugees who were "not able" to return to their homes - without discussing the reasons. The Diaspora Armenians often raise this issue.


"…[A]n unknown number of Armenian Women and Children appropriated by Moslem households during the terrible atrocities of 1915 remained in captivity and I have not heard of steps being taken by the Angora Government to release them, as it behooved them to do if they were to dissociate themselves effectively in Western eyes from the regime of Talaat and Enver. There were also something like 300,000 Armenian refugees from the same atrocities in the territory of the Erivan Republic, who had been living there for five years in extreme destitution and with an appalling death-rate, but who were not enabled to return to their homes in Ottoman territory, even after the formal conclusion of peace between Angora and Erivan at the close of 1920. These were bad marks against the nationalist Government, even allowing for the fact that they were omissions to repair the ill-doing of their predecessors and not positive misdeeds of their own.".

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p191)




Treatment of Minorities in Ottoman Turkey

Toynbee was well informed of the details concerning of the state of the religious minorities in Turkey , millets, etc:



"It is undoubtedly true that down to the latter part of the seventeenth century the Middle East had the more tolerant tradition toward alien subjects, and this tradition was of Eastern derivation. It was based on Islamic law, which had been codified from the Qur'an and the Traditions during the first two centuries of the Arab Caliphate and largely embodied the practice of that empire. The status of the conquered communities is clear. Conversion or a super-tax, not conversion or the sword (as is often believed in the West), was the alternative offered them; and as the supertax was the backbone of the imperial budget, the Treasury (staffed for the first two generations by Christian clerks) did not encourage the multiplication of true believers. This super-tax was not altogether inequitable, since, in return for the special revenue which it extracted from communities which capitulated on these terms, the Islamic Government guaranteed them protection… …This ancient Islamic tradition was inherited by the Osmanlis, was coordinated (in the millet system) with the new nomadic institutions of their empire, and has never entirely disappeared. During the last two centuries, Ottoman subject communities have been massacred for pursuing Western-made political ambitions, but they have never, like dissenting subjects of Western Governments, been compelled to emigrate or else conform."

(Toynbee - "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey" p 267-8 )


Miscellaneous General-Interest Passages

Toynbee on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian Question

In the years leading up to 1961, Toynbee had become increasingly popular in Europe and in the U.S. but this changed suddenly as a result of some comments he made about Israel.


"In 1917-1918 Toynbee had backed the Zionist program but in later life he condemed Zionism and even went as far as to equate the moral conduct of Israel with that of Nazi Germany. "


"The diminution of Toynbee's stature in American eyes became irremediable after 1961, when he aroused widespread Jewish antagonism by equating the moral conduct of Israel with that of Nazi Germany. Controversy blew up sud­denly on 26 January 1961 when a student newspaper at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reported that in the course of an informal question and an­swer meeting with students he had insisted that "the Jewish treatment of Arabs in 1947 is comparable to the Nazi murder of six million Jews." News ser­vices picked this up and within a few hours headlines blossomed throughout the English-speaking world. Within hours, the Israeli ambassador to Canada invited Toynbee to debate, and he agreed. They met on 31 January at Hillel House on the McGill campus, where they firmly but politely explored their differences. Toynbee had to admit that Arabs had committed atrocities too, and that Nazi atrocities were on a far bigger scale than what had happened in Pal­estine; but he reaffirmed his view that some of the "massacres by Israeli armed forces in Palestine do compare . . . in moral quality with what the Germans did," having been planned in advance, carried through deliberately, and aimed at eliminating an ethnic group from a particular piece of territory. He referred specifically to deeds of extremists like the Stern Gang and Irgun, and admitted "I do not know how far the Haganah [the official armed force of the nascent Israeli state] was also implicated.

Toynbee had obviously struck a raw nerve. Jewish dissatisfaction with the way he had treated their history in medieval and modern times was already at the boil. As far back as 1934 he had asserted that Jewry was a fossil, surviving from an otherwise extinct Syriac civilization. Such an unflattering label ran­kled. His longstanding opposition to Zionism had also aroused counterattack by figures as prominent as the future Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs Abba Eban."

( McNeil - "Arnold Toynbee - A Life" p 246 )

Toynbee's comments on War and World Order

Comments on War in general and on Armenians and Jews in particular

In his 1922 Book, Toynbee made some interesting comments on war and the treatment of Jews and other Religious Minorities comparing their treatment in Western countries to their treatment in Moslem countries.

In a long chapter discussing how war brings out the beast in man, Toynbee decries "boasted Western superiority" and mentions how Ottomans are aware of the fact that Spanish Speaking Jews of the Levant were originally -in Europe- "forcibly converted, driven by oppression into desperate revolts, and then massacred, despoiled, and evicted by its Western conquerors at the very time when in the Near East the Osmanli's were allowing conquered non-Moslems to retain their cultural autonomy and were organizing Orthodox Armenian, and Jewish Millets as official departments of a Moslem state. I have heard Turks express ironical regret that they did not Westernize in the fifteenth century after Christ. If they had followed our example then, they would have had no minorities to bother them today!"

( McNeil - "Arnold Toynbee - A Life" p267)



McNeil quotes a remarkable statement from Toynbee on War in General:



"I personally believe that the principal cause of war in our world today is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities or States. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions. . . The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum; and if it loses sight of God as He is revealed in Christianity it will inevitably relapse into the worship of Juggernaut and Moloch. .

Indeed, the terrific hold which the institution of war manifestly possesses over the hearts of men lies, surely, in the opportunity for self-sacrifice which is offered to the individual by this cult of Moloch. An uncompromising demand for submis­sion and self-abnegation and self-sacrifice is manifestly the strength of those mili­tant State cults-whether Fascist or Communist-which have been most successful in gaining converts during these post-war years. People will sacrifice themselves for the "Third Reich" or whatever the Ersatz-Gbtzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God. " -from a Toynbee letter to the Manchester Guardian, April 9, 1935



( Quoted in McNeil - "Arnold Toynbee - A Life" p185)

His comments on World Order



Toynbee made a trip to America in 1942. The Rockefeller Foundation paid for it and arranged for him to meet with "worthwhile groups". Mcneil sums up Toynbee's "message" on this trip as follows:



"The Burden of his message was that a durable peace would require the United States to take an active part in world affairs, repudiating the isolationism of the 1920's and 1930's and subordinating national sovereignty to some sort of world government. In a meeting at Princeton on October 7th, his comments were summed-up by Van Dusen as follows: "Toynbee followed, to both Dulles' and my surprise, by insisting that there were no adequate solutions of the main problems of world order apart from world government. His specific proposal was a reconstruction of a World Association of Nations, to which all the United Nations would initially belong, and tha Axis powers as soon as possible; and the allocation to the four major powers of responsibility for police" Van Dusen later stated "there is no reasonable likelihood of avoiding either a third world war or chaos, except through organized and effective world government. Dulles was reluctantly compelled to concede the validity of this conclusion."

In Toynbee's own papers this world government was mentioned saying "The new [world] government must thenceforth be independent of any nation or group of nations, and those who determine from time to time its powers and personnel must come to include those who are now neutrals or enemies. As Christians we must proclaim the moral consequences of the factual interdependence to which the world has come. The world has become a community and its constituent members no longer have the moral right to exercise 'sovereignty' or 'independence' which is now no more than a legal right to act without regard to the harm which is done to others. The time has come when nations must surrender the right to do that which is immoral."



( McNeil - "Arnold Toynbee - A Life" p183-4)