TWO ORIENTAL DREAMS OF UNITY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3352, 12 June 1918, Page 55

TWO ORIENTAL DREAMS OF UNITY.

By Jessie Mackay.

(Concluded.) We have glanced at the light thrown on the beginnings of Pan-Turanianism by the writer who calls himself Tekin Alp. From that authority we learn that as early as 1915 the Pan-'l urkish scheme pre-sup-posed the utter break-up of Russia under the battering forces of the Central Powers. Tekin Alp could not foresee that two and a-half years later the prime allies of Turkish Irrcdentism would be found within Russia itself, in those dangerous dreamers and specuiators, the ultra-Socialist Bolsheviks. There is much in Russian current history on which it is impossible as yet even to hazard comment, tut it is at least obvious that not another such Gilbertian transaction can be found in modern annals as the coquetting of the Bolshevik hen with the Teutonic fox before his open den at Brest Litovsk. Whether Bolshevism has any recuperative power in itself or not the cautious outsider can hardly determine yet, but it is plain that Marie Botchkareva, the Russian Joan of Arc, who formed the Battalion of Death, has no faith in the present regime, or she would not have disguised herself for that romantic recent escape to Belgium, where she again seeks opportunity to avenge her ow.h and her country's wrongs. The Russian Revolution of last year at first appeared to sound the death-knell of Pan-Turanianism. The public renunciation of territorial ambition and pointedly the renunciation of claims on Constantinople, removed the greatest bar between the aims of the Russian Turks anl their Christian fellow-workers for progress. The proclamation of freedom and equal rights for all peoples under the Muscovite Hag seemed to assure them that one very considerable province of Islam would henceforth become an honoured and influential part of the new democracy of Europe, and so remove the reproach of increasing servitude which had fanned the fires both of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Turanianism.

But these bright hopes all depended on the cohesive and constructive powers of the new republic. These powers were not evident when the situation, was reviewed six months ago. The Bolshevik Government is now more utterly bankrupt of all that makes for nationhood. An empty treasury, a starving population, an industrialism paralysed, and an army evaporated all seem to open the way for Ottoman intrigue to gather the wreck of Russo-Mohammedanism into the web. There is little comfort to be gained from the happenings- between December and May. At the moment of writing the Ukraine is being strangled by Germany, the last'fort guarding Petrograd has been abandoned, the Crimea has been taken, Mohammedans and Russians are killing each other in the burning streets of Baku, and Russian Turkeston has proclaimed itself a republic. If the tie between Russia and Central Asia, the latest-won and least assimilated of her provinces, be broken, and for aught we know it may almost be broken now, it is hard to see how the new Russia could retrieve empire there. The upshot would appear to be a strong homogeneous Turkish State north of Afghanistan and India, in the very situation to become a fourth member of that Turco-Persian-Afghan alliance which the Young Turks are straining every nerve to secure. What such a quartet would mean to our Empire and to Christendom may be imagined. Even already we have to face the unwelcome surprise of discovering that, however sick the Turk may be in Europe, he was never more robust in Asia.

Six months asro the tangled Russo-Turk-ish situation stond at this : —Should Constantinople or Kazan be the ' heart of Western Islam? If Russian republicanism had any staying power, the Moham medans of Russia proper would remain faithful, and turn the tables on Ottoman intrigue by attracting not only their less stable fellow-religionists in Asiatic Russia, but the Anatolian Turks themselves. It is true that the more central and more strongly industrial young city of Baku on the Caspian Sea would probably in the end supersede the older culture of Kazan as an Islamic centre; but that could not affect present developments. If Russia, however, either fell to pieces, as she appears to be doing, or girded herself with a repressive and reactionary policy, the natural result would appear to be the triumph of the Pan-Turkish ideal. If Russia can neither mend nor end the present hopeful regime of Socialism undented, what hope is there for Christendom? The immediate hope, as it appears to-day, involves a powerful addition to the holocaust which has already ushered in the first hyper-Socialistic polity of "peace and brotherhood" vet achieved. Marshal Joffre, the man who best knows what price France is already paying for life and liberty, urged nearly a year ago that military help should be sent to Russia. President Wilson has declared that America will not see Russia destroyed. What that means we may see ere long; but the only safe prophecy at

present is that Marx will not be popular reading in intelligent circles for some time to come.

So much for the Russian side of the menace. Nov/, on the Turkish side, there are for consolations that perhaps fall cold on the immediate apprehensions of the pessimist. The Turkish race was aiid is capable of savage drives through a disunited Christendom ; but it shows no more faculty for governing or welding than it did five centuries ago—so far as the one Turkish people that has had a wide Imperial experience goes. And it is difficult to believe that out of tho turbulence of Afghanistan, the corruption of Persia, and the wildness of Central Asia any more cohesive element could come. A PanTurkish coalition conceivably might wreck Western Europe for a generation,; but it could not control its Empire for even as long against a United Christendom-—the one coalition that hitherto the Turk has never faced.

One powerful cause of the artificiality of all national sentiment in European Turkey seems to have escaped all the publicists. This is tho heterogeneous basis of family life in the dominant classes. For five centuries the motherhood of Turkey has been mainly slave or captive and alien. Among the Turks the Mohammedan idea of woman dropped to its lowest—a lowest unknown among the freer Arabs, with their comparatively higher spiritual perceptions. The Turk did not woo the mother of his sons; he bought her for her beauty in the market. Circassian. Georgian, Persian, Greek, Levantine, Armenian, Syrian—all strains have flowed through and through the Mongol race of Osman, till now the Turk, mongrel of Europe, is Turk in little more than name. Nature might have evolved blessing out of a motherhood in many cases racially higher, but Mongol custom and the Koran decreed that only the worst elements of this crossing should survire in a motherhood so stunted and thwarted. The inevitable trend of a famil" life founded on selfishners and sensuality is typified in Abdul Hamid himself, who. we are told, was the son of a beautiful Armenian renegade, the life-long enemy of her unhappy race. Among the tremendous issues to be decided ere long not the least is the growth or destruction of Pan-Turanianism, an alternative strangely bound up with the immediate future of republican Russia.