Greeks Quotes
Xerxes whose troops outnumbered the Spartans many to one send a message demanding that the Spartans under Leonidas lay down their arms. With the refusal the Persians attacked and eventually killed all the 300 Spartans who had fought so brilliantly that they had killed 20,000 Persians. The battle allowed the Greeks to mobilize other troops and totally demoralized the Persians.
Turkey had just defeated a Greek invading army with bitter atrocities on both sides. The two countries were bitter enemies. His colleagues thought Ataturk had lost is sense of reality to even suggest such a thing. 50 years later Greece and Turkey were both in NATO.
Alexander and his army were approaching the city of Persian King Darius. The King asked for a truce assuming that a settlement of treasure and land could be worked out as war was usually fought in those days. However, Alexander had led a punitive war where revenge was the major objective. Alexander rejected a truce and chased Darius to his death.
The Turks had massacred the vast majority of their Armenian population, and treated the Greeks badly killing and them many of them from territories the Ottoman Turks had conquered. Jews fared better but were 2nd class citizens. Bristol was the American State Department’s senior official and was very “understanding” of the murders and ethnic cleansing despite the fact that President Wilson and most American politicians were very opposed to the Turkish massacres. See {620614} and {620599} . Two factors makes this quotation very significant. First, at the time the State Department was not really under the control of either the President or the Congress. It was not rare for the Department to have its own policies and implement them. This began to change in WWII and FDR exercised much more control than previous presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. The second factor is that there were many racists throughout the State Department—Bristol was only one. There was little concern for minorities’ welfare and the emphasis was on commerce. See {620600} Even in Truman’s administration, the President had massive opposition from the State Department for his policy of recognizing the State of Israel. Today, this kind of racism in the State Department is very rare, and human rights has been one of their major concerns. There were many changes in 75 years.
Although they were a Christian sect, there was not a lot of tolerance then by the Catholic Church especially for Christians who theologically deviated slightly from official doctrine. Ironically, the Muslims who conquered Egypt and Syria were much more tolerant of the Syrian Christians than their fellow Christians were. See {634767} for his view of Islamic tolerance.
The report was on the Turkish brutality in Post WW I Smyrna against the Greek population. Several hundred thousand Greeks were killed. This was after the Armenian Genocide during WWI. The irony was that America, England and France all agreed that Turkey should administer the Turkish port city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast of Anatolia which was inhabited by a substantial Greek Orthodox Christian population in Muslim Turkey. In addition to the problem of a religious minority, the Turks had then, and many still have today, a desire for revenge against the Greeks. Greece had been a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for centuries until the Greek revolt of 1821. Ethnic Greeks living in Turkey, with an equally paranoidal preoccupation in history did not make very good citizens of Turkey.
