Monday, January 30, 2023

Tuesday, January 30, 1923. Forced Relocation of Greeks and Turks

The treaty between Greece and Turkey which resulted in the forcible relocation more than 1.6 million people based on ethnicity and religion, 1,221,489 Turkish-born Greek Orthodox Christians and 400,000 Greek residents of Istanbul and Muslim Turks on the Greek side of the divided area of Thrace, were exempt, although many people relocated anyway.

The treaty was the first of the massive ethnic and religion based movements of peoples that would become a feature of the mid 20th Century, and which were a perversion of one of Wilson's Fourteen Points.  By the end of, and following, World War Two this would be conducted on a massive scale, particularly in Eastern Europe.

All of the imperial powers that had gone into World War One were multiethnic, at least to some degree.  The Germans, for example, had a large Polish population that was not only in what we'd regard as Poland, but also in areas which had a mixed Polish/German, population, and populations of ethnic Germans were present in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, the USSR,and elsewhere.  In what became Poland after World War One, there remained populations of Ukrainians and other peoples, and Ukraine also included populations of Poles.  Ukrainians extended out into what was then and now regarded as Russia.  Finns remained in areas that Russia retained.  And what was left to Turkey of the Ottoman Empire included not only Turks, but Armenians, Greeks and Kurds.  The concept that all nations had to be nation states, a perversion of nations getting states as envisioned by Wilson, was a direct cause of World War Two. 

Exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II visited with monarchist Germans in Nijmegen about a possible return to the German throne, but decided the time was not ripe.  It never would be.

Department of Agriculture Poultry Club.

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