German propaganda and ethics—The unsuccessful "Holy War" and the German Government—"The Holy War" a crime against civilisation, a chimera, a farce—Underhand dealings—The German Embassy the dupe of adventurers—The morality of German Press representatives—A trusty servant of the German Embassy—Fine official distinctions of morality—The German conception of the rights of individuals. Now that we have given a rough sketch of the main events of the war as it affected the economic life of the people, and have devoted a chapter to that sinister crime, the Armenian persecutions, we shall leave the Young Turks for a moment and turn to an examination of German propaganda methods.
It is a very painful task for a German who does not profess to be a "World Politician," but really thinks in terms of true "world-politics," to deal with the many intrigues and machinations of our Government in their rela[Pg 127]tion to the so-called "Holy War" (Arab. Djihad), where in their quest of a vain illusion they stooped to the very lowest means. Practically all their hopes in that direction have been sadly shattered. Their costly, unscrupulous, thoroughly unmoral efforts against European civilisation in Mohammedan countries have resulted in the terrific counter-stroke of the defection of the Arabs and the foundation of a purely Arabian Chaliphate under English protection. Thus England has already won a brilliant victory against Germany and Turkey in spite of Gallipoli and Kut-el-Amara, although it seems probable that even these will be wiped out by greater deeds on the part of the Entente before long. One could not have a better example of Germany's total inability to succeed in the sphere of world-politics.
The so-called "Holy War," if it had succeeded, would have been one of the greatest crimes against human civilisation that even Germany has on her conscience, remembering as we do her recent ruthless "frightfulness" at sea, and her attempt to set Mexico and the Japanese against the land of most modern civilisation and of greatest liberty. A success[Pg 128]ful "Djihad" spreading to all the lands of Islam would have set back by years all that civilisation so patiently and so painfully won; it would not have been at all comparable with the Entente's use of coloured troops in Europe which Germany deprecated so loudly, for in the Holy War it would have been a case of letting the wildest fanaticism loose against the armies of law and order and civilisation; in the case of the Entente it was part of a purely military action on the part of England and France, who held under their sway all the inhabitants, coloured and otherwise, of those Colonial regions from which troops were sent to Europe and to which they will return.
But the attempt against colonial civilisation did not succeed. The "Djihad," proclaimed as it was by the Turanian pseudo-Chaliph and violently anti-Entente, was doomed to failure from the very start from its obvious artificiality. It was a miserable farce, or rather a tragicomedy, the present ending of which, namely the defection of the Arabian Chaliphate, is the direct contrary of what had been aimed at with such fanatical urgency and the use of such immoral propaganda.
[Pg 129]
The attempt to "unloose" the Holy War was due primarily to the most absurd illusions. It would seem that in Germany, the land of science, the home of so many eminent doctors of research, even the scholars have been attacked by that disease of being dazzled by wild political illusions, or surely, knowing the countries of Islam outside-in as they must, they would long ago have raised their voices against such arrant folly. It would seem that all her inherent knowledge, all her studies, have been of little or no avail to Germany, so that mistake after mistake has been committed in the realm of world politics. It may be said that Germany, even if she were doubtful of the issue, should still not have left untried this means of crippling her opponents. To that I can only reply by pointing to the actual position of affairs, well known to Germany, not only in English, but also in French and Russian Islamic colonial territory, which should have rendered the "Djihad" entirely and absolutely out of the question.
Let us take for example Egypt, French North-West Africa, and Russian Turkestan, not to speak of the masterly English colonial[Pg 130] rule in India, which has now been tested and tried for centuries. Anyone who has ever seen Egypt with the area under culture practically doubled under modern English rule by the help of every kind of technical contrivance for the betterment of existing conditions, and the skilful utilisation of all available means at an expense of millions of pounds, with its needy population given an opportunity to earn a living wage and even wealth through a lucrative cultivation of the land under conditions that are a paradise compared with what they were under the Turkish rule of extortion and despotism—anyone who has seen that must have looked from the very beginning with a very doubtful eye on Germany's and Turkey's illusions of stirring up these well-doing people against their rulers.
The same thing occurs again in the extended territory of North-West Africa from the Atlas lands to the Guinea coast and Lake Chad, where France, as I know from personal experience, stands on a high level of colonial excellence, developing all the resources of the country with consummate skill, shaping her "empire colonial" more and more into a shining[Pg 131] gem in the crown of colonial endeavour, and, as I can testify from my own observations in Morocco, Senegal, the Niger, and the Interior of the Guinea territories of the "A.O.F." (Afrique Occidentale Fran?aise), capturing the hearts of the whole population by her essential culture, and, last but not least, winning the Mohammedans by her clever Islam policy.
That, finally, Russia, at any rate from the psychological standpoint, is perhaps the best coloniser of Further Asia, even German textbooks on colonial policy admit unreservedly, and the glowing conditions that she has brought about especially in the basin of Ferghana in Turkestan by the introduction of the flourishing and lucrative business of cotton-growing are known to everyone. Only politicians of the most wildly fantastic type, who see everywhere what they want to see, could believe that in this war the Turkish "Turanistic" bait would ever have any effect in Russian Central Asia, or make its inhabitants now living in security, peace, and well-being wish back again the conditions which prevailed under the Emirs of Samarkand, Khiva, and Bokhara. But Germany, who should have been[Pg 132] well informed if anyone was, believed all these fantastic impossibilities.
One could let it pass with a slight feeling of irritation against Germany if it were merely a case of the failure of the "Djihad." But unfortunately the propaganda, as stupid as it was unsuccessful, exercised in this connection, will be written down for all time as one of the blackest and most despicable marks against Germany's account in this war. In Turkey alone, the underhand manipulation for the unloosing of the "Holy War" and the German Press propaganda so closely allied with it, indeed the whole way in which the German cause in the East was represented journalistically throughout the war, are subjects full of the saddest, most biting irony, to sympathise with which must lower every German who has lived in the Turkish capital in the eyes of the whole civilised world.
In order to demonstrate the r?le played in this affair by the German Embassy at Constantinople I will not make an exhaustive survey but simply confine myself to a few episodes and outstanding features. An eminent German Red Cross doctor, clear-sighted and[Pg 133] reliable, who had many tales to tell of what he had seen in the "Caucasus" campaign, said to me one evening, as we sat together at a promenade concert: "Do you see that man in Prussian major's uniform going past? I met him twice in Erzerum last winter. The man was nothing but an employee in a merchant's business in Baku, and had learnt Russian there. He has never done military service. When war broke out, he hurried to the Embassy in Pera and offered his services to stir up the Georgians and other peoples of the Caucasus against Russia. Of course he got full powers to do what he wanted, and guns and ammunition and piles of propaganda pamphlets were placed at his disposal so that he might carry on his work from the frontier of the then still neutral Turkey. Whole chests full of good gold coins were sent to him to be distributed confidentially for propaganda purposes; of course he was his own most confidential friend! He went back to Erzerum without having won a single soul for the cause of the 'Djihad.' That has not prevented his living as a 'grand seigneur,' for the Embassy are not yet daunted, and now the fellow struts about in a major's[Pg 134] uniform, lent to him, although he has never been a soldier, so that the cause may gain still more prestige."
Numerous examples of similar measures might be cited, and instances without number given, of the German Embassy being made the dupe of greedy adventurers who treated them as an inexhaustible source of gold. First one would appear on the scene who announced himself as the one man to cope with Afghanistan, then another would come along on his way to Persia and play the great man "on a special mission" for a time in Pera while money belonging to the German Empire would find its way into all sorts of low haunts. And so things went on for two years until, with the Arabian catastrophe, even the eyes of the great diplomatic optimists of Ayas-Pasha might have been opened.
I will only mention here how even a bona fide connoisseur of the East like Baron von Oppenheim, who had already made tours of considerable value for research purposes right across the Arabian Peninsula, and so should have known better than to share these false illusions, doled out thousands of marks from his[Pg 135] own pocket—and millions from the Treasury!—to stir up the tribes to take part in the "Djihad," and how he returned to Pera from his propaganda tour with a real Bedouin beard, and, still unabashed, took over the control of the German Embassy's "News Bureau," which kept up these much-derided war telegraph and picture offices known in Pera and elsewhere by the non-German populace as sacs de mensonges, and which flooded the whole of the East with waggon loads of pamphlets in every conceivable tongue—in fact these, with guns and ammunition, formed the chief load of the bi-weekly "culture-bringing" Balkan train!
I will only cite the one example of the far-famed Mario Passarge—a real Apache to look at. With his friend Frobenius, the ethnographer and German agent, well known to me personally from French West Africa for his liking for absinthe and negro women and his Teutonic brusqueness emphasised in comparison with the kindly, helpful French officials, as well as by hearsay from many scandalous tales, Passarge undertook that disastrous expedition to the Abyssinians which failed so[Pg 136] lamentably owing to the Italians, and then after its collapse came to Turkey as special correspondent of the Vossische Zeitung and managed to swindle his way through Macedonia with a false Italian passport to Greece, where he wrote sensational reports for his wonderful newspaper about the atrocities and low morale of Sarrail's army—the same newspaper that had made itself the laughing-stock of the whole of Europe, and at the same time had managed to get the German Government to pursue for two years the shadow of a separate peace with Russia, by publishing a marvellous series of "Special Reports via Stockholm," on conditions in Russia that were nothing but a tissue of lies inspired by blind Jewish hate; if a tithe of them had been true, Russia would have gone under long ago.
I need not repeat my own opinion on all the machinations of the German Embassy, but I will simply give you word for word what a German Press agent in Constantinople (I will mention no names) once said to me: "It is unbelievable," he declared, "what a mob of low characters frequent the German Embassy now. The scum of the earth, people who would[Pg 137] never have dared before the war to have been seen on the pavements of Ayas-Pasha, have now free entry. Any day you can see some doubtful-looking character accosting the porter at the Embassy, whispering something in his ear, and then being ushered down the steps to where the propaganda department, the news bureau, has its quarters. There he gives wonderful assurances of what he can do, and promises to stir up some Mohammedan people for the "Djihad." Then he waits a while in the ante-room, and is finally received by the authorities; but the next time he comes to the Embassy he walks in through the well-carpeted main entrance, and requests an audience with the Ambassador or other high official, and we soon find him comfortably equipped and setting off on a 'special mission' as the confidential servant of the German Embassy." But even the recognition of these truths has not prevented this journalist from eating from the crib of the German Embassy!
I cannot leave this disagreeable subject without making some mention of a type that does more than anything to throw light on the morale of this German propaganda. Every[Pg 138]one in Constantinople knows—or rather knew, for he has now feathered his nest comfortably and departed to Germany with his money—Mehmed Zekki "Bey," the publisher and chief editor of the military paper Die Nationalverteidigung and its counterpart La Défense, published daily in French but representative of Young Turkish-German interests. Hundreds of those who know Zekki also know that he used to be called "Capitaine Nelken y Waldberg."............