Historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee died OCTOBER 2, 1975.
Providing
foreign intelligence for the British during World Wars I and II,
Toynbee was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conferences.
Educated
at Oxford "almost entirely in the Greek and Latin Classics," Toynbee
taught at King's College of London, the London School of Economics, and
the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Toynbee
authored many history books, including Greek Policy Since 1882 (1914),
and The Murderous Tyranny Of The Turks (London, New York: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1917), in which he wrote:
"Turks...from Central Asia,
ruled during the first two centuries of their conquests
by...unscrupulous Sultans, who subjugated the Christian populations of
Asia Minor and South-Eastern Europe, compelling part of these
populations to embrace Mohammedanism,
and
supporting their own
power by seizing the children of the rest, forcibly converting them to
Islam, and making out of them an efficient standing army, the
Janizaries, by whose valour and discipline the Turkish wars of conquest
were carried on from early in the 15th down into the 19th century."
Toynbee explained:
"The
Greeks were leaders of civilization in the Ancient World and in the
Middle Ages, till the Greek Empire of Constantinople was conquered by
the Turks in 1453...
The Armenians were the first people to make
Christianity their national religion...They produced a fine literature
and architecture, which Turkish conquest destroyed...Turks have
repressed all symptoms of Armenian revival by massacres..."
Tracing history, Toynbee continued:
"There are three stages in the history of Ottoman tyranny...
Osman,
its founder, from whom the Osmanli Turks take their name, was the
hereditary chief of a wandering band of Turkish freebooters from Central
Asia...carve(d) out a principality for himself at the expense of the
neighboring Christians..."
This Ottoman dominion, which started
thus in the 13th century with a few square miles of territory in
North-Western Asia Minor, expanded during the next 300 years till it
stretched from within a few miles of Vienna to Mecca and Baghdad.
It
destroyed the Ancient Empire of Constantinople, which had preserved
Greek learning during the Middle Ages; the free Christian kingdoms of
Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Hungary...
Such a career of destructive conquest was a disaster to civilization, and it was only made possible by a ruthless militarism..."
Toynbee described:
"The
Ottoman method of conscription was to take a tribute of children from
the conquered Christians so many children from each family every so many
years bring them up in barracks as fanatical Moslems and train them as
professional recruits.These 'Janissaries,' militarized from
their youth up and divorced from every human relation except loyalty to
their war-lord, were the most formidable soldiers in Europe, and each
new Christian land they conquered was a new field of recruitment for
their corps.
The Ottoman Empire
literally drained its victims'
blood, and its history as a Vampire-State is unparalleled in the history
of the world."
Toynbee wrote further:
"This
was the first stage in Ottoman history; the second...was internal and
external decay. The Empire was cut short by Austria, Russia and other
foreign powers; the subject peoples began to win back their freedom by
breaking away from under the Turkish yoke...
The
Turkish...tradition of violence and cunning...
tried to stave off the
consequences of its own rottenness by making the subject peoples even
weaker and more wretched than itself. 
This was the policy of Abd-ul-Hamid, who reigned from 1876 to 1908, and his method was to set one race against another.
Kurds
were encouraged to massacre the Armenians; the Turkish soldiers were
ordered to join in the massacre when the Armenians put up a
resistance...Turkish troops came up and burned the village for treason
against the Ottoman State. "
Toynbee
described the brief euphoria when dictator Abd-ul-Hamid was deposed and
they were promised democracy. But high hopes were dashed when this
Turkish 'Spring' was co-opted by fundamentalist Muslims who began a
genocide, as Toynbee described:
"In the first stage the subject peoples paid their tribute of children...
In the second stage they were hounded on to destroy each other by the Machiavellian policy of Abd-ul-Hamid.
The third stage has been introduced by the Young Turks...a government employing its resources in the murder of its own people...
When
the Young Turks came into power in 1908 they announced a program of
"Ottomanisation." Every language in the Empire but Turkish was to be
driven off...Non-Turkish majority was to be assimilated to the Turkish
minority by coercion...
The
Turks drive forth Greeks and Bulgars destitute from their homes and
possessions. The Magyars mobilize troops to terrorize Slovaks and
Romanians at the elections; the Turks draft the criminals from their
prisons into the Gendarmeri to exterminate the Armenian race...
The
Young Turks have pursued their nationalistic program by butchery. The
Adana massacres of 1909...occurred within a year of the proclamation of
the Young Turk Constitution, which assured equal rights of citizenship
to all inhabitants of the Empire.
In
1913 the Turkish Army was engaged in exterminating the Albanians
because they had an un-Ottoman national spirit of their own. This work
was interrupted by the Balkan War, but the Turks revenged themselves for
their defeat...by exterminating all Greeks and Slavs left in the
territory they still retained...
Only a third of the two million
Armenians in Turkey have survived, and that at the price of apostatizing
to Islam or else of leaving all they had and fleeing across the
frontier.
The
refugees saw their women and children die by the roadside, and apostasy
too, for a woman, involved the living death of marriage to a Turk and
inclusion in his harem.
The
other two-thirds...were marched away from their homes...with no food or
clothing for the journey, in fierce heat and bitter cold, hundreds of
miles over rough mountain roads. They were plundered and tormented by
their guards, and by subsidized bands of brigands, who descended on them
in the wilderness, and with whom their guards fraternized.
Parched
with thirst, they were kept away from the water with bayonets. They
died of hunger and exposure and exhaustion, and in lonely places the
guards and robbers fell upon them and murdered them in batches some at
the first halting place after the start, others after they had endured
weeks of this agonizing journey.
About half the deportees and there was at least 1,200,000...perished thus on their journey,
and
the other half have been dying lingering deaths ever since at their
journey's end; for they have been deported to the most inhospitable
regions in the Ottoman Empire: the malarial marshes in the Province of
Konia; the banks of the Euphrates where, between Syria and Mesopotamia,
it runs through a stony desert; the sultry and utterly desolate track of
the Hedjaz Railway...
The
same campaign of extermination has been waged against the Nestorian
Christians on the Persian frontier...In Syria there is a reign of
terror...
The 'Deportation Scheme' was drawn up by the central
government...No State could be more completely responsible for any act
within its borders than the Ottoman State is responsible for the
appalling crimes it has committed against its subject peoples..."
Toynbee wrote:
"Turkish
rule...is now, oppressing or massacring, slaughtering or driving from
their homes, the Christian population of Greek or Bulgarian
stock...Armenia and Cilicia, and Syria, where within the last two years
it has been destroying its Christian subjects...
The Young
Turkish gang who gained power when they had deposed Abd-ul-Hamid, have
surpassed even that monster of cruelty in their slaughter of the
unoffending Armenians.
The 'Committee of Union and Progress'
began by promising equal rights to all races and faiths...It
proceeded...to expel the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Western Asia
Minor, and to exterminate the Armenians...
The Muslim peasant of Asia Minor is an honest, kindly fellow when not roused by fanaticism...
President Wilson...called upon...Allied Nations...that they...make good their words:
'The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks...'"
Toynbee continued:
"Turkish
tyranny...putting the clock in South-Eastern Europe a century back...to
reconquer for Militarism the field which the 19th century won here for
Democracy...destroying without interference a multitude of smaller and
weaker peoples from Alsace to Romania and from Schleswig to Baghdad..."
Arnold Toynbee was a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922).
His
12-volume Study Of History (1934-1961), described the rise, flowering,
and decline of 26 cultures from Egypt, Greece and Rome to Polynesia and
Peru.
After World War II, Toynbee wrote Historians Approach To
Religion (1956), and Change And Habit: The Challenge Of Our Time (1966),
in which he predicted that China would become the major global power if
the United States and the Soviet Union could not maintain world order.
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," argued Toynbee, who saw religion as a prime motivation in history.
Toynbee continued:
"When
I started, religion was not a prominent feature...In writing my study, I
have been constantly surprised to find religion coming back to fill an
even greater place."
Toynbee concluded:
"So what does the universe look like?..It looks as if everything were on the move either toward its Creator or away from Him...
The
course of human history consists of a series of encounters... in which
each man or woman or child...is challenged by God to make the free
choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.
When Man refuses, he is free to make his refusal and to take the consequences."
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