By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS [The Atlantic] – Sean McMeekin is a professional historian with a deft popular touch, based at a modern Turkish university, and he is careful to salt his engrossing and enlightening narrative with frequent allusions to this famous thriller, which after all contains the most that many people know about the First World War’s forgotten front. He gently corrects Sir Walter [Bullivant]’s deranged diagnosis of Enver Pasha and the “Young Turk” revolution he led in 1908, while pointing out that it was in fact the actual view of the British Foreign Office. According to the two most senior of His Majesty’s diplomats in Constantinople, Gerard Lowther and Gerald Fitzmaurice, Enver and his associates were rooted in crypto-Jewish Freemasonry, with its adeptness at “manipulating occult forces,” and modeled themselves on “the French Revolution and its godless and levelling methods.”

Rather to the contrary, the Young Turks were to become the enthusiastic allies of German imperialism and the promoters of global jihad. This bizarre fusion of ancient and modern, revolutionary and reactionary, was symbolized above all by the grandiose project of a railroad extending from the capital of Germany to the capital of Mesopotamia: a line that could eventually challenge British command over Suez and India. If asked to discuss some of the events of that period that shaped our world and the world of Osama, many educated people could cite T. E. Lawrence’s “Arab Revolt,” the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement portioning out the post-war Middle East, and the Balfour Declaration, which prefigured the coming of the Jewish state. But who can speak with confidence of Max von Oppenheim, the godfather of German “Orientalism” and a sponsor of holy war? An understanding of this conjuncture is essential.

Continued at The Atlantic | More Chronicle & Notices.