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- 6 02 2003 - 22:36 - katatonik

“German jihad”

“In November 1914, in the presence of Germany’s new ally the Ottoman Sultan, the Sheikh-ul- Islam issued a fatwa declaring a holy war against Britain and her allies.

...

Even less effective were the German schemes for a jihad against British, French, and Russian imperialism. This was partly because the imperial authorities were more than a match for them. It was also because the German schemes were ill conceived. They tried to win over Lij Yasu, the emperor of Abyssinia, through Leo Frobenius, “the ethnographer and German agent, well known…for his liking for absinthe and negro women.” They proposed sending 50,000 Turkish troops to mobilize the Cossacks of the Kuban region in southwest Russia (present-day Krasnodar) under an officer who happened to be the brother of the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Metropolitan of Halyc. They even sent an expedition to the Emir of Afghanistan, the members of which traveled via Constantinople disguised as a circus troupe.

The German field marshal Colmar von der Goltz—who was to die of typhus in Baghdad in 1916—consoled himself by taking the long view:

If we are defeated this time, perhaps we will have better luck next time. For me, the present war is most emphatically only the beginning of a long historical development, at whose end will stand the defeat of England’s world position…[and] the revolution of the coloured races against the colonial imperialism of Europe.


Also from here.

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