12-29-2018, 03:45 PM
(12-29-2018, 12:57 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: In a twitter post by Peter Zeihan (zeihan.com) it was mentioned that Turkey covets Aegean islands. It seems that there is a broad consensus in Turkey that some of these islands are Turkish territory, and occupied territory.
Most likely candidates are some of the Dodecanese islands off the southwestern coast of the Turkish mainland that Italy took from Turkey after World War I and held until Italy broke with Nazi Germany in 1943. Italian forces aligned with the new, anti-fascist government tried to defend them from Nazi Germany but were defeated. Under Nazi rule the Nazis executed Italian defenders and started deporting every jew that they could get their hands on to Nazi murder camps (Some Jews wisely took refuge in Turkey, where they were safe). The population is largely Greek and Greek Orthodox, and after liberation in 1945 from the Demonic Reich those islands came under British protection and were transferred to Greece in 1947. Some of these islands are so close to the Turkish mainland that they impinge upon the usual maritime limits of Turkey. Surely there have been arrangements for rights of navigation between Greece and Turkey, countries that had been at war intermittently for a century.
Turkey managed to avoid becoming another victim of Axis aggression. The Allies did not want Turkey involved in World War II, but I would suppose that the British and Americans would have given all aid necessary to the Turkish Republic and would have eventually used Turkey as a springboard of liberation of southeastern Europe. The Nazis were so horrible in Greece that even after a century of enmity that has origins in Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire and subsequent oppression of Orthodox Greek populations that the Turks would have been seen as liberators in Greece. Turkish territory looks easy to defend from the east but difficult to attack from the west due to the terrain, which reflects both the failure of the Byzantine Empire to take back areas lost to the Seljuk Turks when the Byzantine Empire was still a significant power and the failure of the Greeks to take over some parts of Asia Minor (including Smyrna) with large Greek populations in the five years following World War I.
Rightful treatment might have been to return those islands with majority-Turkish populations to the Turkish Republic, which could have been established through a plebiscite under UN supervision. A wise course of Italian defenders would have been to cede the Dodecanese Islands to Turkey pending a decision by the United Nations, most likely a plebiscite.
History does not always enforce the wise or just decision and often cannot determine what is the wise or just decision.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
