Conspiracy and Pedantry--Thank you, Ianus!

Submitted by Caleb (United States), Oct 1, 2010 at 00:22

The book "L'Avature kemaliste", much appreciated by the Armenian diaspora in France, shouts a warning in its very subtitle about what a danger National Turkey is to everyone. Unprophetic. Turkey withdrew to strict **neutralite** once its new borders were fixed and never endangered anyone that didn't endanger her first. "Peace at home, peace abroad." The author is **legitimiste**, a royalist, that is to say. Also. in today's terms a conspiracy theorist.

That soldiers and officers of a defeated army or one that has been disbanded seek work as mercenaries isn't a new story. Xenophon and his ten thousand might be the first recorded description of mercenaries (401 BC) but they hardly are the last. Alexander himself met Greek mercenaries in service of Persia soon after bridging the Hellespont. They begged for clemency from their fellow Greeks. Everyone knows the Macedonian response, "You fight for money. Earn it.".

And like the ex-**Wehrmacht** who ended up fighting in Indochina with the French Foreign Legion from 1946 to 1950, the German officers Ianus enumerates in such pedantic detail served the Turkish Nationalist cause entirely unofficially, going or remaining there to escape the hunger and chaos of post-World War Germany.

Yes Gen. Liman von Sanders was in overall command of the Turkish armies. Command in the field at **Galipolu** however was held by the newly-promoted Mustapha Kemal Pasha. Even the most brilliant strategy is only as good as the soldier who must put it in action. The order of the day to Kemal's 19th Division: "I do not order you to fight. I order you to die!" Some, many perhaps, did. They died for their country. But in the spirit of the US general Patton, they made enough British Empire soldiers die for **their** country to convince them to give it up as a bad job and sail away.

PS: I, too have been searching unsuccessfully for a reference to that quote by Ariel Sharon. I read it some time in the eighties in one of the national news magazines, **Time** or **Newsweek**.

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