“I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be
the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to
crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”
It is not necessary to accept every jot and tittle of Jonathan
Swift’s misanthropy, as expressed above to Gulliver from the mouth of the King
of Brobdingnag, to recognise that mankind is a volatile compound of the sublime
and the disgusting. It would be comforting if we could point to a modern escape
from primitive savagery, but, alas, the last 150 years have seen some of the
lowest points in our civilisation.
Conflicts and wars may be inevitable features of the human
condition but the brutalisation of innocent civilian populations has now been
honed to an exact science. The examples are legion and from the late 19th
century, the main perpetrators were the Ottoman Turks. By later standards, the Bulgarian Horrors of 1876-7 were a
sideshow with only some 20,000 victims but the bloody retribution, usually by
beheading, exacted on the civilian population by Turkish soldiers following the
uprising and siege of Batak was enough to rouse the unrivalled oratory of WE
Gladstone, 4 times Prime Minister of Britain, and stir the conscience of the
English-speaking world.
Tragically, this was but a prelude. The Ottoman Empire was
crumbling and the Young Turks, the government from 1908, embittered by losses
in the Balkan Wars, embarked upon a merciless campaign against its Christian
minorities, Greek and Armenian. Entering the Great War on the side of Germany
it viewed these minorities as “the enemy within”: First they fell on the Pontic Greeks, those settled since the
7th century BC on the Black Sea littoral (Pontus) centred on
Trebizond. Forced expulsions, military labour and casual murder led to the
deaths of about 300,000 Greeks (the statistics in all these matters are
unreliable). Even worse, the Greeks of
Asia Minor, a large ancient community, were cruelly repressed from 1915 to
1923, not much helped by the abortive 1919 Greek invasion of Turkey, resulting
in the deaths of a further 900,000 culminating in the murder, rape and pillage of
thousands at the 1922 Fire of Smyrna.
A League of Nations compulsory population exchange saw 1.5m Anatolian Greeks,
displaced and impoverished refugees, settling miserably in the modern Greek
state in the 1920s.
 |
| Greek Victims of the Turks |
The Turks earned the palm for brutality by perpetrating the Armenian Massacres throughout the Great
War. The Christian Armenians are an ancient civilisation formerly long settled
in the Eastern part of Anatolia, with its own language, culture and Orthodox
Church. The Young Turk leaders, (Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha and Djemal Pasha,
whose names live in infamy) ordered the systematic eradication of the
Armenians. Their villages were looted, their men shot out of hand and their
women and children driven into the desert to be slaughtered by bandits and
Kurds. It is estimated that 1.5m Armenians died and the very word “genocide”
was first coined to describe their fate. The trail of responsibility is well
documented but even now the Turkish government is in “genocide denial” and the
hurt is still deeply felt in the Armenian Diaspora
in the small (formerly Soviet) republic of Armenia, in the Lebanon and in the
United States.
 |
| Armenian victims of Turkish Genocide |
In the inter-war years, a new excuse for persecution
emerged, the branding of some people as “class enemies”; Stalin in 1930, as
part of his agricultural collectivisation programme, ordered the Eradication of the Kulaks, the
relatively prosperous Russian peasant class, describing them as
“blood-suckers”. Some 5m Kulaks were uprooted and about 1m died; the
fellow-travelling European Left stood idly by but it was a wasteful and
heartless crime even in the eyes of many Old Bolsheviks.
The Second World War was to herald many catastrophes and
much suffering on a global scale. Yet even now it is hard to come to terms with
the truly unspeakable German crime, the Holocaust
of European Jewry. The Jews had
been the butt of nationalist hatred and endemic anti-Semitism for generations.
Many of the most talented found havens in France, Britain and the United
States, much enriching all three. But how could Germans stand and watch while
Hitler and his Nazi gang dehumanised the Jews by calling them Untermenschen, seized their property,
restricted their movements and finally herded them into camps and murdered
them? The death toll resulting from Hitler’s poisonous opinions, acted upon by
Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann was a horrendous 6m.
 |
| The Horror of Auschwitz |
These cruelties are all the more unforgiveable coming from
the Germans, from whom we would expect so much better. The Germans have a high
culture of philosophy, of music and of scholarship, great industrial genius and
yet were capable of sinking to the lowest depths of depravity and barbarity.
The post-war horrors rather pale in comparison. 12m Ethnic Germans in Eastern and Central Europe,
often the aged, women and children, suffered terribly from expulsions and revenge
executions, the death toll being impossible to quantify. The Khmer Rouge appalled the world with
their killing fields in Cambodia from 1975-9 resulting in about 1.7m deaths as
a result of their “social engineering” policies. The expression “ethnic
cleansing” achieved a wide currency in the long disintegration of Yugoslavia
with principally the Serbs murdering civilians in Bosnia and Kosovo (8,000 Muslims massacred at Srebrenica in 1995). A
uniquely horrible episode came from Africa with the Genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 at the hands of their ethnic
rivals, the Hutu. The Tutsis, described on Hutu radio as “cockroaches” –
classic dehumanisation – were hunted down to be clubbed or knifed to death. The
UN estimate 800,000 died.
 |
| Tutsi Victims of Hutu Genocide in Rwanda |
Readers, we “have supp’d full with horrors” in Macbeth’s
words. I have recalled huge bloody events but often the smaller ones are
equally painful. Three days ago, in the waters off my adopted Aegean island of
Samos, Turkish (yes, them again) people traffickers crammed 60 apparently
Syrian refugees in a yacht designed to carry a maximum of 15. The yacht
capsized and 22 passengers died, locked in the hold below. Nobody much cared: the
pity of it all!
Jonathan Swift in his self-composed epitaph at St Patrick’s
Cathedral, Dublin, spoke of the saeva
indignatio (savage indignation) which lacerated his breast. Imagine his
indignation at the crimes described above!
Yet, mankind is by no means irredeemably cruel: it can
achieve sublimity. We must just understand that we cannot enjoy sunshine all
the way and sometimes the shadows are very dark indeed.
SMD
8.05.14
Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2014
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