Publisher's Synopsis
On one level "Smyrna 1922" is a modern Greek tragedy replete with the elements of irony and horror. The Greeks, one of the victorious Allied powers during World War 1, were betrayed by their allies and their army driven into the sea at Smyrna by the forces of Mustapha Kemal, an insurgent leader to whom his former enemies had given considerable covert help. There followed an enactment of the week of orgy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; pillage, rape and massacre culminating, in this instance, in the spectacular destruction by fire of Smyrna (now Izmir), considered an "infidel city" by the Turks because of its predominantly Greek character and population. Dobkin's study is a definitive work concerning a debacle deliberately "soft pedalled and almost expunged from the memory of modern day man" in the words of Henry Miller in "The Colossus of Maroussi".;The complex historical prelude and aftermath to this cataclysm constitute a survey history of the Ottoman Empire between 1907 and 1923. They include the expulsion of Turkey's Christian minorities by a policy of mass extermination of Armenians under cover of World War I and by renewed massacre and expulsion of the large Greek population between 1919 and 1923.;This book lays bare the origins of festering current hostilities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and attitudes toward the West, particularly the United States which after World War 1 set an erratic pattern in its Middle Eastern policy. Hitherto unpublished evidence from official sources suggests that "Smyrna 1922" serves as a paradigm for the subsequent conduct of United States foreign relations with Greece, Turkey, and much of the Middle East.;Dobkin has set events in their historical context. She has exposed the economic motives behind the Western posture and the primacy of oil in setting foreign policy in the Middle East since 1918. She has researched through official documents and interviewed eyewitnesses to the Smyrna disaster.
