The Christian Minorities in Turkey: Bedrohte Kulturen - Minderheiten - Hoffnungsträger

"They (the Turks) could not understand that a conquered people were anything except slaves. When they took possession of a land, they found it occupied by a certain number of camels, horses, buffaloes, dogs, swine, and human beings. Of all these leaving things ... they regarded as the least important.For centuries the Turks simply lives like parasites upon these overburdened and industrious people. They taxed them to economic extinction, stole their most beautiful daughters and forced them into their harems, took Christian male infants by the hundreds of thousands and brought them up as Moslem soldiers. ...Under the reformed Turkish state, were Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, and Jews to be regarded as their "filthy giaours". ...After five hundred years' close contact with European civilization, the Turk remained precisely the same individual as the one who had emerged from the steppes of Asia in the Middle Ages. He was clinging just as tenaciously as his ancestors to that conception of a state consisting of a few master individuals whose right is to enslave and plunder and maltreat any people whom they can subject to their military control. ... We no discovered that a paper constitution ...could not uproot the inborn preconception of this nomadic tribe that there are only two kinds of people in the world - the conquering and the conquered.The physical destruction of 2.000.000 men, women, and children by massacres, organized and directed by the state, seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire. ...And now the Young Turks ... Their passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the extermination of all Christians - Greeks, Syrians and Armenians." Henry Morgenthau: Ambassador Morgenthau' s Story