David Fromkin > Quotes

“Decisions, by all accounts, including those of the participants, were made with little knowledge of, or concern for, the lands and peoples about which and whom the decisions were being made.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today. The basis of political life in the Middle East—religion—was called into question by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty, in its place. Khomeini's Iran in the Shi'ite world and the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Sunni world keep that issue alive. The French government, which in the Middle East did allow religion to be the basis of politics—even of its own—championed one sect against the others; and that, too, is an issue kept alive, notably in the communal strife that has ravaged Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

“إن الأفكار الساسية الأوربية تعتبر فى بقية العالم من الأمور المسلم بها فلا يناقشها أحد، ولكن واحد على الأقل من هذه الأفكار هو الإيمان المعاصر بحكومة مدنية علمانية، يعتبر عقيدة غريبة عن منطقة معظم سكانها ولمدة تربو على الألف عام أكدوا ايمانهم بشريعة دينية تحكم كل جوانب الحياة ومن ضمنها الحكومة والسياسة”
― David Fromkin

“لقد كان عصرا اصطُنِعت فيه بلدانُ الشرق الأوسط وحدودُه في أوروبا؛ فالعراق وما نسميه الآن الأردن- على سبيل المثال- هما اختراعان بريطانيان، والخطوط رُسِمت على خارطة بيضاء من قبل سياسيين بريطانيين بعد الحرب العالمية الأولى، بينما أُنشِئت حدود المملكة العربية السعودية والكويت والعراق من قِبل موظف مدني بريطاني عام 1922. ورَسَمت فرنسا الحدودَ بين المسلمين والمسيحيين في سوريا ولبنان. ورَسَمت روسيا الحدودَ بين المسلمين والمسيحيين في أرمينيا وأذربيجان السوﭬياتة.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

“In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“By the time that the war came to an end, British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be of benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“warships”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“Their second enterprise was the modernizing revolution that began with science and went on to industry and technology. Modernization was born in Europe, of rationalism and science. In many respects “Europeanization,” “westernization,” “Americanization,” and “modernization” all mean the same thing.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“Baedeker, Karl, Palestine and Syria: With Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylon and the Island of Cyprus: Handbook For Travellers, 5th edn, remodelled and augmented (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1912).”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“By the end of 1915 the Allies found the situation so menacing that the Russians, supported by the 8,000-strong Russian-officered Persian Cossacks, occupied the north of the country, taking over the capital city of Teheran and, with it, the weak, recently crowned young Shah. The most pro-German of the politicians fled, initially to the holy city of Qum, and later to Kermanshah, near the Ottoman frontier, where a German puppet government was established, backed by Ottoman troops.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“It is the Jews and not us that everyone is against,” he wrote. “If the Jews would keep their silly mouths shut they could buy up the whole country.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“Reginald Wingate… wrote that “Moslems in general have hitherto regarded the Hejaz revolt, and our share in it, with suspicion or dislike”; an that it was important to make Hussein look as though he had not been a failure in order to keep Britain from looking bad.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

“In”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“course all is not well with life in the United States today. The witches’ brew that blends racism, poverty, joblessness, drug addiction, and crime continues to poison part of the society, and to haunt the rest.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“My own equally broad generalization is that the development of conscience was a theme of ancient times, and the pursuit of freedom, a theme of modern times.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“Today the alternatives are gone: that, perhaps, more than anything else, is what has happened in the last five hundred to a thousand years. Now we’re all in the same boat. It may be a seaworthy boat; but it would be less worrisome if there were more than one.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“The Russian Imperial Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, put it more or less in those terms in 1864 in a memorandum in which he set forth his goals for his country. He argued that the need for secure frontiers obliged the Russians to go on devouring the rotting regimes to their south. He pointed out that “the United States in America, France in Algiers, Holland in her colonies—all have been drawn into a course where ambition plays a smaller role than imperious necessity, and the greatest difficulty is knowing where to stop.”6”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“Those Greeks and Romans,” he protested, “they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I’ve said just as good things myself. But they got in before me.”3”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“2300 B.C.: a Semitic warrior-king, Sharru-Kin, once a high official of the Sumerian city of Kish, a leader now known from the Bible as Sargon, conquered his neighbors to create the world’s first empire.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz.
(Page 451)”
― David Fromkin

“It is a conflict that pits rational interests against irrational emotions. Whatever the outcome, what seems likely to distinguish the twenty-first century from its immediate predecessors and to give it its special character, is that this internal struggle, rather than a conflict between great powers, seems likely to be the overriding issue.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“The Arab revolt for which Hussein hoped never took place. No Arabic units of the Ottoman army came over to Hussein. No political or military figures of the Ottoman Empire defected to him and the Allies. The powerful secret military organization that al-Faruqi had promised would rally to Hussein failed to make itself known. A few thousand tribesmen, subsidized by British money, constituted Hussein’s troops. He had no regular army. Outside the Hejaz and its tribal neighbors, there was no visible support for the revolt in any part of the Arabic-speaking world. The handful of non-Hejazi officers who joined the Emir’s armed forces were prisoners-of-war or exiles who already resided in British-controlled territories.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

“Fear of Russian expansionism was at the heart of the Porte’s policy. The Turkish ambassador told Deedes that if the Allies won the war, they would cause or allow the Ottoman Empire to be partitioned, while if Germany won the war, no such partition would be allowed to occur. That was why the Porte had become pro-German… (Enver did not mention that, in addition, Germany had given a written guarantee to protect Ottoman territory…)”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

“Now, for what must have been the first time, a species was altering its behavior independent of external coercions. It was giving up an existing practice of life that still was successful, and in fact was far more in harmony with its environment than the new way.”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“population. By the end of 1915 the Allies found the situation so menacing that the Russians, supported by the 8,000-strong Russian-officered Persian Cossacks, occupied the north of the country, taking over the capital city of Teheran and, with it, the weak, recently crowned young Shah. The most pro-German of the politicians fled, initially to the holy city of Qum, and later to Kermanshah, near the Ottoman frontier, where a German puppet government was established, backed by Ottoman troops.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe’s domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day’s combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

“The other three independently invented civilizations in Eurasia did it, as the Sumerians did, in the course of bringing rivers under control: the Nile in Egypt; the Indus in the Indian subcontinent; and the Yellow”
― David Fromkin, The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century

“but President Harding told Secretary of State Hughes, “Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion…”23”
― David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East