TURKEY AND GREECE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3140, 23 October 1922, Page 2

TURKEY AND GREECE.

Professor Arnold J. Toynbee has spent the past eight years in studying the contact of civilisations in the Near and Middle East, and from, his pen there has just been issued from the press a volume that has made an, opportune appearance. Reviwing the work the Daily Telegraph points out that the author is Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History at the University of London. In addition to this, he was employed on Turkish affairs in and for the Foreign Office up to and during the Peace Conference of Paris. Consequently he is peculiarly fitted to give an impartial verdict on one of the most equivocal of international complications. Hut, besides all this wealth of equipment for his task, ho has the incommunicable gift of expression so that the general reader as well as the student will find much to attract him in these admirable written pages, on the very first of which he points to the truth behind the truth, the inner reading of a problem by no means modern, but, on the contrary, old as time. Savages, the author reminds us. perturbed by the waning of the moon never realise that conies from the shadow of their own planet. In precisely the same way, we of the West deplore the short-comings of Eastern nations without realising that they are under our own shadow. Western isaion, in short, is by no means the penacoa that so many popular writers have made it appear. "Western sentiment," says the author, "about the Greeks and Turks is for the most part ill-in-formed, violently expressed and dangerously influential. lb is an irresponsible revolutionary force — a, signal instance of that fatal conjunction of unwvv=,eAuus,uess. y.ud nower which characterises the modern Western attitude towards the rest of mankind." This Western sentiment has made of the modern Greek the descendant of Pericles, and of the modern Turk a barbarian "incapable of progress." It is a point of Anew based on "the three false antitheses of Christianity and Islam, Europe and Asia, civilisation and barbarism." The author shows conclusively that "Christian" is not the equivalent of "Western," and that "islam" does not imply necessarily any negation of Western ideals. As for the antithesis between "Europe" and. "Asia," this volume proves in intimate detail that the Greeks are not specially at home in Europe, nor the Turks in Asia. On the third antithesis, the most widely spread. Professor Toynbeo appeals conclusively to history :

"Tire Greeks 'have Hellen, the son of Deucalion, to their father,' while the 'Unspeakable Turk' its a 'nomad from the steppes,' and share* the odium of the Scythian, the Mongol, and the Hun. This is the greatest nonsense of all. If it is a question of physical transmiission, our modem Greek contemporaries have about as little Hellenic blood in their veins as our Osmanii contemporaries have of nomadic. If it is 1 one of spiritual heritage, I hope T 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 Hellenes' spiritual descendants; a>nd! that there is even a lierceptible Hellenistic strain in the, Osmanlis' Middle Eastern culture." The Turk is- admittedly backward, but there is considerable forte in the author's suggestion to the Greeks that instead of complacently dwelling on their superiority to him they should compare themselves with the Russians, "a people of their own Near-Eastern civilisation, who came into contact with the "West at about the same date as they, and under parallel conditions." Setting aside the Bolshevik regime, itself a reaction against Westernisation, he asks why, apart from mere material force and expansion. Russia, both in literature and 1 music, towers 1 above the hairs of Pericles. "The secret of Russia's mental greatness appears to be that she has kept her spiritual individuality. While embracing the West, she lias refused to surrender herself to it entirely." However this may be. the Greek suffers from Westernisation by being puffed up, and the Turk by being depressed. One has been inflated through our uninformed opinion, and the other depreciated even below his own quite modest self-valuation. So much for the popular view of tlin West in regard to the East; but what of the popular view of the Ea*'i ill regard to the West? This. too. is equally misinformed, My the manufactured irony of international politics, and in the very teeth of the Entente Coruiale. Paris, the natural legatee of Athenian culture, stands at the elbow of the Turk, while London, so long the prop of thai, strenuous '.'sick man.'' finds herself the backer of the Greek. Consequently there has been a widespread belief in the Greek and Turkish armies that the Great Powers, like the ancient divinities, were supporting; their favorites. In the Green army the legend of French officers in command of the enemy was at least as persistent as that legend of Russian troops in England at the commencement of the Great War. At firs! the legend made the Greeks more fiery ■ "We should have got. through the first day but for the French, and we shall git through now in spite of them." FSut later 01: the legend proved discouraging: "V, c are not up against the Kemalists, bid against the French," liecnme a common cry. and with it the (|uestion. "How can we fight the French?" And when the author returned from the ISiui-a front to Constantinople he was assured by Turkish friends who hail stayed in Constantinople all the time that the Greek offensive had been under the direction of British officers. But both these smaller nations had, considerable excuse for self-reliance. In the autumn of 1!)21 Greece was in possession of much more than what had been accorded to her by treaty. She had made good her treaty rights, while the. Great Powers had been content to waive theirs. They had attacked the Turkish Nationalists when the Great Powers had stood aside. The Turk-, on their side, had a right to draw similar conclusions: "They, for their part, had gci rid of the French and Italian zones: they had even secured the retrocession by France of a long strip of frontier territory, containing the permanent way of the Bagd'ad railway, which the Treaty ol Sevres kid included in the French mandated territory of Syria: they had recovered from Uussia territories which she had taken from them in IS7S; and they looked forward confidently to forcing the Greek army out of Anatolia and the Allied garrisons out of Constantinople. This was an unmistakable turn of the tide. Which looked decadent ? Tie West or Turkey?" Hut' beneath the surface Greece and Turkey alike were pawns in a larger game, unci there has been something sinister in the seli-coiilidcnec inspired in each by its powerful patron of the West: "They did mil suspect hew tjU'icklv pawns in distress become an embarrassment, or how little the players care if thev disappear from the board. These Near and Middle Eastern nations are still inexperienced, and their backers have never undeceived them." Certainly the pawns have been in distress in Anatolia, and in the chapter entitled

"The Military Stalemate" the author makes it abundantly clear how cruel the passive deception of the West has been to both sides. Still more tragic is the long chapter on atrocities, in which the author views impartially the ruthlessuess of Turk and Greek. And even in thitf the blight of Westernisation has shown itself. Westernisation, in short, in the old sense, has proved a failure, and the author insists on something different for the future: "A combination of the two principles of reciprocity and individuality," rightly urging that the differential treatment of Greeks and Turks proves the hopeless of either ol theiio principle® without the other.