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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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THE MAKING OF MUSTAPHA KHEMAL

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    At the close of the Great War the Turk was beaten to his feet and his prestige ruined. "The Sword of Islam" had been broken. The victory over the Greeks, though with the aid of European officers and material, and the spectacular destruction of Smyrna with the massacre of its inhabitants, revived the legend of the conquering and avenging Turk. "The Sword of Islam" had been welded again, to conquer and destroy. The noise of that event resounded and is still echoing throughout the Moslem World, in Egypt, in India, in Northern Africa and in Syria.

    And more than that, the rise of Mustapha Khemal, creature of divided Christendom, of the mutually jealous and internecine Occident, has given new courage to all the yellow and black and brown peoples, whom Kipling describes as "the White Man’s Burden," who while they may cut one another’s throats over the question of Mohammed or Confucius or Buddha, are united in their hatred of the white man.

    The ferment in the East is the bubbling up of a deeper feeling, than the careless or unobservant thinker wots of: It is the revelation of a profound and fundamental antipathy. The East is tired of being civilized by superior peoples; of being educated and converted; of being shoved off the sidewalks; of being called "Eurasians" and having their daughters ostracized if they marry whites; of having their children excluded from white schools; of being discriminated against in immigration laws.

    One can not say that the West is entirely wrong in attempting to maintain its prestige and its Occidental civilization, but he can safely affirm that the hatred that has been steadily growing in the Orient is deep and implacable, and that the result will be murders, uprisings, little wars, big wars. The maker of this statement may be set down as an alarmist. So is the man who sticks up the sign at the railway crossing, "Stop! Look! Listen!" The dissension in the Western World that made it possible for the Turks to make a clean sweep of Christian civilization in the Ottoman Empire, to burn Smyrna and massacre its inhabitants in sight of a powerful fleet of European and American war vessels, has added unknown weight to the "White Man’s Burden."

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