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decide at the end of the war and ordinary men still asked to fight and die for forces that might very well turn on them beyond end of war agreements lawrence s duty to britain often called upon him to use the arabs he was advising or leading to advance britain s ends not their own for example it might be in the arabs interest to take some town while it s in the british interest that the arabs attack a nearby railroad depot and the british take the town in his capacity as a british officer it was of course lawrence s duty to carry out his nation s military plans but this meant actively sabotaging the efforts of the arab men fighting under and for him a man cannot serve two masters and this inherent conflict of motives could never truly be resolved so long as lawrence insisted on seeing his men as human beings and not pawns to be moved at will across the battlefields the british command for its part might be excused somewhat by the justification that this was war with thousands of british men being sacrificed by the day upon the fields of europe the deaths of a few handfuls of foreigners for the cause hardly even bore noticing of course the sensible response to discovering that your men are marching into an insatiable meat grinder is to stop marching men into the meat grinder not to throw some arabs in after them but don t look to wwi for wise decisions lawrence was basically able to ignore rationalize his way around his direct orders on the arab front and go do more or less what he wanted simply because the front was so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of the war maybe lawrence and 25 men would blow up a bridge maybe they wouldn t meanwhile nearly a half million men threw themselves at the shores of gallipoli in a disastrous experiment to see whether humans could withstand machine gun bullets attempt to take constantinople 50 thousand allied men perished on those beaches along with 56 thousand ottoman defenders so the arabs are inexplicably in a spot where they weren t expected last week who even cares while lawrence was not completely forthright with his men when push came to shove lawrence tended to side with his men over his commanders advising the arabs to take actions that would hopefully benefit themselves in the eventual peace accords under normal circumstances this might have been termed treason and lawrence hanged but everyone loves a winner and lawrence s strategy of not marching directly into a meat grinder was so comparatively successful that he could not help but be forgiven in the end it didn t really matter britain s strategy of tell everyone what they want to hear until we get out of this mess eventually boiled down to splitting the conquered territory with france with the war finished on the western front the remaining british and french forces so outweighed the small arab force that they more or less dictated the terms of the settlements with the ottomans the arab troops were helpful for distracting and worrying turkish troops during the war but once the fighting was over their utility was spent the adventures of aaron aaronsohn and william yale were also quite interesting aaronsohn s family was one of many that moved to palestine in the early years of the zionist movement but they came from more or less within the borders of the ottoman empire itself the ottoman empire used to rule a significant chunk of south eastern europe including greece the balkans and several nearby areas and as the empire lost its territories in europe former citizens were faced with the question of whether to stay put and become subjects of their new nation or pack their bags and stay part of the empire since aaronsohn s family was jewish they were never accepted into their newly formed nation and so the family kept their ottoman citizenship packed their bags and moved at the time many other jewish families were also moving to palestine from other parts of the world some came from germany others came from russia russia is generally regarded as the worst of the worst for jews in those days and jews were eager to get out aaronsohn grew up in a company town literally run by the rothschilds in something resembling an nrx dream he was very bright so the community paid for him to go to college in america where he studied agronomy these were he days when simply growing enough food to feed everyone was still a pressing concern it was clear to aaronsohn based on historical accounts from the time of the roman empire that palestine ought to be able to grow more food than it currently was aside from importing modern farming techniques he figured out that there were untapped water reserves people simply needed to drill more wells when wwi began all of the belligerent nations were faced with the problem of what to do with their resident alien populations those from allied nations posed no difficulties but immigrants from countries they were now at war with posed potential security threats in particular since the ottoman empire had entered the war on the side of germany and against britain france and russia the empire s german jews were allowed to stay put but its russian jews were expelled and sent back to russia despite the fact that if there was one country in the world that jews hated it was russia and if there was one group of jews that the critically short on manpower ottoman army might convince to take up arms against russia it was jews who had fled russia and been given sanctuary in the oe but never mind that they were simply expelled creating a mass exodus from ottoman controlled palestine to the nearest russia allied country british controlled egypt since aaronsohn s family consisted of actual ottoman subjects they did not have to move but they witnessed the expulsions of many in their communities and the subsequent ottoman army requisitions of virtually everything not nailed down food horses fence posts plows clothes baby clothes women s underwear for the cause and then the locusts came locust swarms of biblical proportions descended upon the land devouring everything the army hadn t children and animals were actually going blind because the locusts would land on their eyes while they were asleep and drink the moisture from their eyeballs the war had barely even begun and the population was already facing starvation the ottomans hired aaronsohn to head the locust eradication program giving him sweeping powers to do whatever was necessary to get rid of the bugs unfortunately local authorities were often less than eager to listen to a jewish guy preferring the eradication strategy of doing absolutely nothing and then the armenian genocide started this is obviously what the ottoman army needed to be spending its energy on at this point in the war right most able bodied armenian males were simply shot but the women children and elderly were force marched into the desert to die of thirst starvation train stations were clogged with throngs of desperate starving people train tracks were clogged with the corpses of formerly desperate people who d been run over by the trains many of the skilled workers on the railroads were themselves armenian and with the official expulsions were also transformed into starving desperate corpses because what army needs a functioning railroad during a war it was basically the zombie apocalypse to his credit enver pasha who apparently wasn t informed of the kill all the armenians policy actually tried to save the starving people streaming into his city by requisitioning food and other resources for them but there wasn t anything to be had because there was already a famine going on meanwhile aaronsohn and some of his close family were travelling up and down the locust affected area watching all of the destruction and thinking oh my god the ottomans are murderously incompetent we have to get the british to invade and start running things or we re all going to die and so aaronsohn became a spy or at least tried to become a spy but that s a story that i ll let you read the book to learn the end of william yale hailed from the family that had gifted the famous university with its name but his particular branch of the family had fallen on hard times and yale went to work as a common laborer for standard oil in oklahoma but yale was ambitious and hard working and the company soon decided to send him to the middle east to scout for oil and so william yale was stranded in the ottoman empire when the war broke out at the time the us was neutral not a combatant so he just hunkered down and tried to look out for standard oil s interests until drilling could resume his status protected him from most of the war s worst privations but he still saw the destruction around him eventually he made it back to the us and joined the war effort in his capacity as a mid east expert or yet another spy though he never abandoned his true loyalty to standard oil the us plays a rather small role in the book since it had almost no part in the ottoman theatre in fact the us never even declare war on the ottomans the us only comes in as player at the end of the story with the americans attempting to influence the creation of a new world order at the treaty of versailles which by all accounts involved a bunch of naïve ideas born of no real experience with the regions under dispute but that shouldn t surprise you if you ve been paying any attention to the past hundred years of us foreign policy so do i recommend it yes it s a good book especially if you re interested in the late ottoman empire lawrence of arabia or wwi i ve now begun reading lawrence s personal memoir seven pillars of wisdom and while i am enjoying it i find that i am quite glad i read lawrence in arabia first even though seven pillars is 650 pages long the material is dense and many events are covered so quickly that i wouldn t know what lawrence is talking about if i hadn t already read about it in more depth in lawrence in arabia i m sure this was less of an issue back when the book was published and the general public was more familiar with the course of various wwi battles 1 comment review the berlin baghdad express may 24 2021 evolutiontheorist uncategorized islam jihad ottoman empire wwi note this book is not actually about the berlin baghdad express railway it has a few good chapters on the subject but the bulk of the book is actually on ottoman german political relations and the ottoman sphere in world war one that said it is a good book about wwi if that s what you re looking for mcmeekin s the berlin baghdad express probably should have been named oppenheim s jihad the book traces the peculiar german notion that they could perhaps in exchange for some bribes inspire the muslim world to come together in an anti french british and russian jihad in support of german efforts in wwi they managed to get the ottoman turks who wanted to take back egypt and the suez canal from the english and to oppose russian advances on their northern border to go along with their jihad idea but the rest of the muslim world was far from convinced the bedouins who depended largely on british traffic for their food and income took german bribe money and disappeared the sherif of mecca perhaps the most important person in the world to get behind an ottoman declared jihad decided the new ottoman government was dominated by secular modernizers and declared war on them instead the sudanese and libyans were less than enthusiastic about trekking across a continent or two to help the germans a muslim uprising within british egypt never materialized the germans never quite overcame the sunni shia split and while the afghanis ostensibly signed on there was never any practical way to get men and materials to and from afghanistan interestingly the largest muslim country in the world at the eve of wwi was not the ottoman empire but the british empire which ruled over millions of muslim subjects in india the ultimate realization of the germans scheme was for muslims in india and egypt to revolt against british rule causing havoc in the colonies and cutting off the suez thus distracting the british from the western front where they and the french had bogged down into a grinding death match stalemate with the germans german propaganda pamphlets undoubtedly made it to india but the jihadi stampede never materialized compared to the colossal cost of the european theaters in wwi these african and asian adventures were small potatoes a week s worth of guns men and bribes might bring whole armies over to the german side in essence they were small bets with small odds but the potential to pay off grandly if any of them worked unfortunately for the germans they all failed jihad might be the duty of all muslims but traipsing across a continent to wage jihad in a foreign country on behalf of the germans did not sound particularly appealing to the vast majority of muslims especially when you could just wage jihad at home against local infidels the ottoman empire s declaration of a holy war against the infidels did however make the empire s 25 non muslims rather insecure and in some cases very dead the war was an absolute disaster for the ottomans who simply had no ability to wage it they were broke without the manpower transportation networks or equipment necessary to undertake a world war the ottoman empire might look impressive on a map but much of that territory was desert wasteland or desert wasteland much of it was sparsely populated by nomads who dabbled in tribal warfare and banditry the hinterlands had not at all been pacified and brought under central control the british supported muslim rulers in egypt didn t want to trade their positions of relative power for subordination to the ottomans and no one wanted to pay higher taxes unlike central europe the ottoman empire had very few completed train lines especially across its vast deserts and even roads were scarce in some areas not to mention water down in mecca the economy was based on the pilgrimage and as mentioned above the world s biggest muslim country was british india british ships brought the pilgrims grain and other foods to a region that could do very little farming for itself war with the british meant for the arabians economic ruin and starvation the german attempt to build railroads across the ottoman empire so that troops and equipment wouldn t have to be transported by wagons and camels across the desert kept running into setbacks from paranoid sultans who were afraid of too much work being completed at once to funding issues to mountains to the sudden loss of all of their armenian employees a non trivial part of the work crews in a country where almost the ethnic turkish population had been drafted the armenian genocide was of course both a humanitarian and strategic disaster while some armenians did side with russia during the war the majority of armenians were in fact loyal subjects and the state could hardly afford to...
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