A Peace to End all Peace by David Fromkin Read Free Book Online

the leadership of the Third Army.
    One day in 1908 a junior army officer named Enver, who was stationed in Salonika and who had also joined Talaat’s group, was ordered to return to Constantinople. Afraid that his membership had been discovered by the secret police, he slipped out of Salonika and took to the hills, to which another Young Turkey army colleague had already escaped. Then another army officer followed his example, taking troops and ammunition with him. The Sultan sent troops against them, but the troops joined the rebels. There was a spontaneous combustion of a bloodless revolution in Salonika: the C.U.P. took control. The Young Turks seized control of the Telegraph Office—it may have been no coincidence that Talaat was one of its officials—and established contact with C.U.P. cells that honeycombed the army and the empire. When the smoke had cleared the constitution had been restored, parliamentary and party politics had resumed, and the following year the Sultan abdicated in favor of his brother.
    The old politicians took office, while the Young Turks remained in the background. But the C.U.P. had become a force with which to reckon, and not merely because of its strong representation in the officer corps of the army. In a disorganized society, the strength of the C.U.P. was that it had branches everywhere, criss-crossing the empire.
    The leaders of the successful uprising at first enjoyed a good-enough press in the western world so that in common parlance “Young Turks” came to mean any brash group of young people with dynamic ideas who rebel against an outmoded leadership. They were viewed with sympathy by the Foreign Office in London, but were disliked and disdained in the British embassy in Constantinople. The ambassador, Sir Gerard Lowther, seems to have fallen completely under the influence of Gerald FitzMaurice, his First Dragoman, or official interpreter and adviser on oriental affairs; and FitzMaurice detested the C.U.P. almost from the very outset.
    FitzMaurice’s interpretation of the events of 1908 was colored by the fact that they had occurred in Salonika, about half of whose 130,000 inhabitants were either Jews or Dunmehs (members of a Jewish sect that had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century). Salonika was also a city in which there were Freemason lodges. Emmanuel Carasso (or Karasu), a Jewish lawyer, had founded an Italian Freemason lodge in which he apparently allowed Talaat’s secret society to meet when it was in hiding from the Sultan’s secret police. FitzMaurice concluded that the C.U.P. was a Latin-influenced international Jewish Freemason conspiracy; and Lowther duly reported this to the Foreign Office in London. Lowther referred to the C.U.P. as “the Jew Committee of Union and Progress.” 8
    FitzMaurice later conducted an investigation of the C.U.P., the results of which were reflected in a confidential report sent by Lowther under his own name on 29 May 1910, to the official head of the Foreign Office, Sir Charles Hardinge. In his report, Lowther pointed out that “ liberté, égalité, fraternité ” (liberty, equality, fraternity), words drawn from the French Revolution, were both the slogan of the Italian Freemasons (hence Karasu’s lodge) and of the Young Turkey movement. The Young Turks, he claimed, were “imitating the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods. The developments of the French Revolution led to antagonism between England and France, and should the Turkish revolution develop on the same lines, it may find itself similarly in antagonism with British ideals and interests.” 9
    In his detailed report of more than 5,000 words, Lowther alleged that Jews had taken over a Freemason network (“The Oriental Jew is an adept at manipulating occult forces…”) and through it had taken control of the Ottoman Empire. Amongst the ringleaders of the Jewish Freemason conspiracy, according to Lowther, was the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Oscar