Another favorite of mine is The Clean-fighting Turk a Spurious Claim. Mark Sykes, as many of you know, was a great traveller and a very intelligent man. He was one of the two people that negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement that was to lead to the dividing up of the Middle East by the British and French after the war. But this story should began with Lloyd George, who did not like Turks very much and who, of course, was Prime Minister. Lloyd George was very interested in defaming the Turks and was personally interested in the propaganda bureau. He instructed that certain topics be developed by the bureau: "[The Turk's] incapacity for good Government; his misrule, and above all, his massacres of all the industrious population." An order from the Prime Minister. He added that the propaganda should be surreptitious: "I need hardly point out that it is very important that all this should be done gradually and that the articles should be spread over a considerable period of time, so as not to make it too obvious what we are driving at. Sir Mark Sykes' article in the Times,' the 'Clean-Fighting Turk,' is just what we want."

The Sykes article can be considered the template for what was produced for the press. Unfortunately, we may never know what all those articles were. If you go through the American and the British press you can read articles and say to yourself, "That must be Wellington House work," but you cannot prove it.

This one we know. The Foreign Office saw a problem, the problem mentioned before--the Turks looked too good to many people in Britain. They were especially bothered by the image of what was called the "Clean Fighting Turk", the image drawn from the fact that the Turks did a good job as soldiers and could be relied as men of honor. Now we will not discuss the accuracy of that claim here. The important point is that it was believed. And so something had to be done about it. Someone had to negate this image, write against it. And so their Foreign Office masters directed Wellington House to do something about the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. The writing of the original message was somewhat mistaken. Wellington House received an order that said they were to propagandize and bring out the image of the Clean Fighting Turk. Wellington House wrote back and said, "Why in the world would you want us to prove that the Turks are clean fighting?" The matter was finally cleared up.

Wellington House went to Mark Sykes and asked him to write an article attacking the good image of the Turks. He agreed and wrote an article. We do not know if what he wrote was much changed by Wellington House, because the relevant records are burned, but we know he wrote the article. We do know that once Mark Sykes' article was finally done a deal was made with the London Times to not only have it published, but also to buy a hundred thousand off-prints. The Times patriotically suggested a good price and the Foreign Office patriotically haggled with them for an even lower price. Forty pounds was paid for a hundred thousand copies.

The article, which was printed at The Times and reprinted all over the United States, used words such as "a merciless oppressor," "a remorseless bully," "pure barbarians," "degenerate," and "has strewn the earth with ruins." It was one of the nicer propaganda works, actually. Sykes fabricated quotes nom the Ottoman government. once again. Or perhaps Talat Paşa kindly told him of his plans. If you wish, you can believe he was in contact with the Ottoman government. Among the truly amazing things he wrote are statements such as that the Turks had invaded and destroyed Baghdad. The historians in the audience are shaking their heads. It was the Mongols, of course. Sykes knew much better. Conflate the history of the Turks and the Mongols? Put all the harm caused by the Mongols on the shoulders of the Turks? Well, you can get away with these things it you know that those who will read the article have no idea about the history. But Sykes knew the truth.

Lloyd George and the Foreign Office were both very happy. Thirty two thousand copies of this publication were sent to the United States alone.

And now Amold J. Toynbee, in many ways a great historian, at least a much respected and revered historian in many quarters. In nothing Toynbee wrote on the Armenians was there ever an indication of who his employers were, which was Wellington House, the propaganda bureau. He retained the image of a scholar who was writing on his own, or perhaps in collusion, or perhaps collusion isn't the best word, cooperation with others.

We will go over Ms first title, The Armenian Atrocities, the Murder of a Nation, only briefly. I will not say much about the book itself other than to say it was an extended catalogue of evils of the Turks. Toynbee mentioned therein that the Armenian refugees who had come to Alexandria were suffering terribly, that they were starving, that they were "dying of disease, exposure and starvation." This, of course, caused the British in Alexandria who were taking care of these people to he a bit upset. The heads of the British agencies in Alexandria wrote back to the Foreign Office bitterly complaining, saying, "What do you mean? We are feeding these people, they are not dying of starvation and disease. Both births and deaths are both completely normal." Toynbee apologized.

The other book, The Murderous Tyranrry of the Turks is interesting for some of its quotes and as an example of the kind of book that was created by Wellington House. I will just describe a few representative selections: Toynbee stated the Turks were engaged in the "maiming and warping of more gifted peoples." This, he wrote, had occurred throughout Turkish history. From the beginning, Turks had maimed and warped "more gifted" peoples. The racist qualities of such a statement need no elaboration. In 1913, according to Toynbee, Turks had been engaged in exterminating the Albanians. "Absolute lies," is all you can say. After the Balkan wars Turks "exterminated all Greeks and Slavs left in their territory." This may surprise those Greeks who survived to fight against the Turks in their independence war--according to Toynbee they had all been killed. He related that Turks had attacked the Arabs, and that Turks were indeed planning right then to exterminate all the Arabs. Turks had no civilization: "They had nothing but the military tradition of violence and cunning." Perhaps a bit intemperate. In fact, an incredible diatribe of a book.

But the book I want to concentrate on, because it is the one that has been most discussed lately, including in the House of Lords. is a book called The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, l915-1916. As you can see, even for a command paper this is a weighty tone. Lord Bryce, the putative author of this book, was a long standing friend of Armenians and enemy of Turks. He was the founder of an Anglo-Armenian Association in 1893. He was very important to the propaganda bureau because he was so respected. He was the President of the British Academy, a former cabinet minister and a very important figure, especially in the United States. You have surely noticed this quality among some Americans, the way they fawn on the British. It is a really strange cultural phenomenon, and a very old one. This was definitely the case with Bryce, who was loved in America, partly because as the British Ambassador he had been such a friend of the United States, partly because he had written a history of the United States, the American Commonwealth, which glossed over all of our faults and sang many high praises of our limited goods. An American would not have written in such a laudatory tone.

The official story was that Bryce, who had friends who were Armenians, had been reading notes sent by Armenians, and that he had decided he had better collect the facts and write a book about it. So he asked Toynbee, who was, I forget the words he used, "a notable young scholar and researcher," something like that. He asked Toynbee if he would compile a book. They then presented the book to Lord Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Lord Grey in turn presented it Parliament. Parliament was so impressed by it that they asked it to be published as a "command" book. In fact that is not at all what happened. What happened was the Propaganda Bureau asked Bryce for a propaganda volume, and said, "We have this man Toynbee here who is pretty good. He can put it together for yow." And that is exactly what happened.

I want to examine the content. The book is six hundred and eighty four pages long and there are so many errors and inconsistencies that we will be here much longer than the time allotted if we consider each of them. We will just talk about the reliability of the sources and the production of the book. One source was letters by Armenians and Armenian organizations. Armenian newspapers were also a source, newspapers like Ararat and Gotchnag. But the biggest sources, the main ones, were American missionaries and missionary organizations. Now, in order to understand why this is a problem, we have to examine those missionaries as sources, something that has not been done in the recent reprint of The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916, which also incidentally does not mention that Toynbee worked for the Propaganda Bureau. A digression on Missionaries: The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief was founded in November of 1915. There were other Armenian relief organizations before that. According to the circular that went out when the organization was founded, it was a "non-sectarian" organization. The table shows the board of directors of that organization. We do not have time to go through the whole list, but if you were to do so, you would notice that every single member of the board, except one, was part of the American protestant missionary establishment. The exception, obviously, being Rabbi Wise, who was not a Protestant Missionary. Everyone else was a missionary or a member of a missionary support group. Many of them had been through the mission field at some point or other.

The leaders of the main missionary groups--the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, and others--were all members of these organizations. "Secretary" meant the boss in these organizations. These people began their new mission to aid the Armenians with a relatively small pamphlet, in which they identified why people should help their organization. It began, of course, with atrocity propaganda. Naturally Talat Paşa was spuriously quoted once again. Talat Paşa supposedly said, "the Armenians would pray for massacre." That is, he was going to treat the Armenians so badly that they would rather be dead. I personally find it hard to believe that he really would have said these things to missionaries.

Table Four. Board of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief

The introductory pamphlet spoke of rapes, enslavements, and the "murders of nearly all able-bodied Armenian men above the age of twelve."

The Relief Organization engaged in an eight-year policy of vilifying Turks, from 1915 to 1923. It is interesting that in 1923, once the Turks had won and the Mission obviously would not survive unless they got along with the Turks, suddenly all changed. Suddenly Turks were being praised by missionaries. But until then, the Turks were evil. To build their missionary organization was one of their purposes, but their main purpose was a good one. Their main purpose was to collect money for what indeed were starving Armenian and Syrian (Assyrian) Christians, to try to make sure that these people had food and the orphans had shelter. It was a good purpose. They used a not-so-good means to get the money, which was to vilify the Turks in every way, because there is nothing that draws in funds like portraying a horrible enemy that is oppressing these people and will succeed unless you help, unless you contribute. Which is what they did.

Later on the missionary establishment attempted to get the United States government to actually take over and turn Turkey into an America mandate. They failed that because the American Congress refused, saying, basically, that it would be bad for business and would cost too much.

Studying what they preached unfortunately takes a long time. You must read much truly disgusting literature. What they wrote was not what one would expect of clergymen. Yet one reason they was so successful is exactly that people expected that clergymen would not lie.

We only have time for a few examples. One of the leaders of the missionary propagandists was a man named Rockwell, who I will describe in a moment. He wrote in one of his pamphlets, "Never since the world began has there been such a reign of torture and of butchery as that to which the Ottoman hordes have subjected this helpless and unoffending nation. It is a scheme planned by high and skilled ability [the Germans] and carried out by low brutality [the Turks]."

In all of the writings of the missionaries Turks were never victims; Armenians were always victims. Armenians never killed; Turks always killed. Turks, and I am not exaggerating in any way, Turks persecuted orphans; Turks were cannibals; Turks held auctions of Armenian women; Armenians were a majority all over the east of Anatolia; all young Armenian males had been killed by Turks; all women, every one, were raped by Turks; the Turks hated education and always persecuted the educated; no Christians had ever been part of the Ottoman government. Turks needed Christians because the Turks were racially incapable of being "doctors, dentists, tailors, carpenters, every profession or trade requiring the least skill." And the missionaries wrote that now that the Turks had killed the Armenians, Westerners who were going to have to come in and take over Turkey, because the Turks had rid themselves of the only people with brains, the Armenians, and the Turks could not run the country themselves.

As the missionaries described them, Armenians were happier than the other inhabitants of the Near East. The Muslims had "pinched faces, pale faces, anxious faces, careworn faces, listless faces. hungry faces, sickly faces of little children, and older faces that had grown sour and sullen." But Armenians smiled.