The roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the 'half-mad imperial enterprise' of Germany's last Kaiser Wilhelm II,
George Walden The Observer,
In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar wrote of Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran's President Ahmadinejad might envy: "If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief!" Sean McMeekin's book helps us understand how such a pearl of murderous mendacity could ever have been uttered. Islamic ties to National Socialism can be traced back as far as Kaiser "Hajji" Wilhelm II (German emperor from 1888-1918) who, for not especially religious reasons, became infatuated with the Muslim world.
"A half-mad imperial enterprise of fin-de-siècle Europe," is McMeekin's description. The Rasputin of the piece was Baron von Oppenheim, a man of protean hatreds, not only towards the entente powers (the British, French and Russians), but most notably towards himself. A self-loathing Jew of pathological proportions, every word of his title was a lie: he was neither a baron, a "von", nor in the dynastic or religious sense an Oppenheim. The wealthy grandson of Salomon Oppenheim, founder of the great bank, he lived as a harem-keeping Arab and filled the emperor's ear with anti-British and antisemitic bile, and chaotic dreams of empire.
After his attempts to goad Muslims into massacring the infidel came to not very much, Oppenheim was, by the 1930s, on the Nazis' payroll, introducing his fanatically Jew-hating friend Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (appointed by the British) to Hitler. It was Husseini who helped Heinrich Himmler form Muslim SS units in the Balkans; they proceeded to murder 12,600 of Bosnia's 14,000 Jews.
Third in a book rich in antiheroes is Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman Sultan from 1876 to 1909 and paranoid reactionary, eventually dethroned and imprisoned by the Young Turks revolt in 1909. McMeekin suggests that it was in part the failure of the British to support the reformists that kept Turkish ties with Germany in place after Hamid's fall.
McMeekin is scathing about British blindness. A more imaginative approach to the Young Turks could have changed this aspect of the war: Germany's ties with Turkey were predominantly with the reactionaries and our influence with the forces for change could have weakened Berlin's position. The reasons we failed to see the future were culpably stupid: a distrust of the Young Turks based on crazy rumours about their supposedly Jewish connections.
The Berlin-Baghdad railway runs like a thread through the whole calamitous tale. Strategically, its aim was to bind Turkey and the Germans together, while sabotaging Britain's links with India by threatening Suez, and providing Germany with its own shortcut to the east through Basra.Its construction, begun in 1903, was repeatedly delayed for financial and technical reasons: 27 tunnels were required, many of them kilometres long through the Taurus mountains. The only concern the Germans manifested about their Turkish allies' infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians in 1915 was that it delayed construction further. Despite massive injections of German cash, the railway was only completed in 1940.
McMeekin talks of this aspect of the first world war as the new great game, and its ironies and anomalies were endless, especially from today's viewpoint. To ingratiate themselves with the Arabs, at one point the Germans and the British were competing to subsidise the purest strain of Islam. Then there is the idea of Catholic and Protestant Germany issuing vicious propaganda inciting Muslims to massacre their Christian brothers. And though they failed to stir up holy war, the Germans had better luck in dispatching Lenin back home to cripple Russia's war effort. Unfortunately for Berlin it was this, together with Germany's success in bringing Turkey into the war, that hastened the downfall of the Romanovs and the onset of the Bolshevik era.
McMeekin's book is also rich in farce. The Bedouins Oppenheim was keen to recruit for his jihad were unreliable holy warriors, given to shouting "Allahu Akbar" so loudly before battle they gave away their position. Muslim recruits to the SS taught about the closeness of Nazi and Muslim ideals responded so well that some began to see the Führer as the second prophet.
The biggest winners in this theatre, the author believes, were the Bolsheviks and the Turks, who regained lost territories as well as their independence. For Britain, there was little more than the poisoned inheritance of Mesopotamia and Palestine. McMeekin is hard on everyone involved, but especially the Germans. To encourage reactionary Islam, squandering a fortune in bribes in the process, and help the Bolshevik revolution succeed while losing the war, does not say much for the abilities of the Kaiser and his lieutenants.
The roots of current catastrophes in the Middle East, he writes, are conventionally attributed to the postwar cynicism of the entente powers. There are reasons for this, but McMeekin wonders why Germany's responsibility is missing. To me, it appears as another example of Anglo-American puritan guilt-grabbing, a perverted form of spiritual pride illustrated by our tendency to beat our breasts louder than anyone else.
McMeekin has written a powerful, overdue book that for many will open up a whole new side to the first world war, while forcing us to be less reticent in confronting indelicate matters, such as the origins of Nazi-Islamist links.
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
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