December 4, 1922

The New York Times

Page 16, Col. 3

THE STATESMANSHIP OF EXTERMINATION.

What The Times thinks about the morality of the Turkish plan to drive

every Greek and Armenian out of Turkey--which means that a great many of

them will die or be murdered on the way, and that others will fall victims

to famine or pestilence in their places of refuge--has already been said. It

has been pointed out, too, that the serious thing is not so much the

morality of the Turk, which has been fairly well known to the world for

several centuries but that of the so-called Christian Powers which stood by

and were consenting.

The British Government protested in the name of humanity when the Greek

revolutionaries shot a group of ex-Ministers and Generals. But when the

Turks announce that a million Greeks are to be expelled from the country

where they have lived since two thousand years before the Turks were heard

of, and driven out to die, Lord Curzon's moral scruples are satisfied with a

request for two weeks delay. Politicians it seems can be knocked by killings

only when the victims are other politicians.

Even granting that this eviction on a grand scale will be

successful--as apparently it will--what is to become of Turkey? What will

become of the deported Greeks and Armenians is, unhappily plain enough. What

of the Turks who will be left to undisturbed enjoyment of the country which

has been somewhat inexactly called their homeland? Their friends make much

of their "racial vitality" which has been demonstrated by the national

revival. But racial vitality which exhausts itself in a capacity for

fighting diplomatic intrigue and a low grade of agriculture is poor

equipment for a nation in the twentieth century, especially for a nation

occupying a country of enormous strategic and military importance. Already

there is trouble in Smyrna. The expulsion of the Greeks and Armenians has

ruined the town. What has happened in Smyrna will happen in Constantinople

if the Christian population is expelled. Turkey will be left a nation of

peasants, and the business which was formerly done by Greeks and Armenians

will have to be done by somebody other than the Turks.

It is too much to suppose that the world will leave the Turks to till

their fields and enjoy the pleasant spectacle of deserted and ruined cities

undisturbed by the complications of modern business. Somebody is going after

the iron and the oil. The great cultured nations of Western Europe which

watch calmly the annihilation of some of the oldest stocks of European

culture may be calm because they think they will get a bigger share of the

business with resident business men out of the way. But business there must

be: even the Turks will need it. And the killing off of the races that have

done the business hitherto will merely widen the field for that foreign

intrigue which the Near East has known for centuries and will continue to

know so long as weak or incompetent States lie in the zone between Asia and

Europe.

There is some justice in the Turkish complaint that the Christian

minorities were used as pawns in foreign diplomatic games: but the games

will go on with other pawns. The Turks will not be let alone, nor will the

Near East cease to be a breeding ground of European wars. The Turks have

found themselves unable to get along with races whose collaboration was

essential if Turkey was to continue to exist under modern conditions. They

knew no way to solve that problem but the extermination of the minorities.

Yet this murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children will in

the long run bring no profit either to the Turks who do it or to the

European Powers which are apparently going to allow it.