Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [150]
That was 1860. The news of the mass killing of Christians in Bulgaria sixteen years later produced a response on a vastly different scale. Yet as Richard Shannon observed, “there was nothing new or unusual in the fact of either the [Bulgarian] insurrection or the massacre. Both were endemic features of Ottoman administration. The massacres in Bulgaria were not unusually extensive, and there is no reason to assume that they were unusually atrocious.”11 To put it crudely, the totals of victims in Damascus and Lebanon in 1860 and in Bulgaria in 1876 were not very different. However, the former provoked anger only among those prone to outrage, while the latter caused a moral crusade on a vast scale. In 1877, the eminent historian E. A. Freeman wrote in the Contemporary Review that opposing the Turks had become a moral imperative: “Men came together as if to deliver their own souls, as if their hearts would not rest within them till their tongues had spoken … to wash their hands clean from the deeds of which they had just heard the tale.” For Freeman, “the common earth had received a defilement, and the common human nature had received a defilement which needed some rite of lustration [ceremonial washing clean] to wipe off from the consciences of all mankind.”12 The agent of this defilement was the “indescribable Turk” or, as one Anglican clergyman privately described it, the “most nauseous of all abominations, Mohammedanism.”13
This superheated language had a precedent. Less than a generation before, in 1857, the British public had eagerly endorsed a wide range of atrocities by the British army in suppressing a “Sepoy Mutiny” in India. Newspapers egged on the government to an ever-greater harshness. They were encouraged in this campaign by many leading figures. On October 4, 1857, the novelist Charles Dickens had assured his readers in London that were he commander in chief in India, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the Race on whom the stain of the late cruelties rested … and with all convenient dispatch and merciful swiftness of execution, to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth.” He meant Indians, of all ages, and, presumably, men, women, and children alike. The mechanism of national outrage worked in the same way on both occasions.
Nations in the grip of a mass social panic, whether the British in the face of the Indian mutiny in 1857 or the Bulgarian horrors of 1876–7 or the United States after September 1, 2001, tend to behave in the same fashion. In all these cases, panic was fueled by the written word and visual images. Public rage developed in 1857 as the British read of white women violated and innocent children cruelly murdered.14 In India as in the Balkans there was little organization or serious planning that engendered the initial massacres.15 The counteratrocities, by the British authorities in India and the Ottomans (1822 and 1877), were carried out as an official act of deliberate terror.16 Neither government believed them disproportionate at the time: they saw themselves faced with a massive and all-embracing conspiracy.
A series of disconnected incidents, beginning with strident Muslim resistance to the plan that a new Orthodox cathedral being built in Sarajevo would tower over the sixteenth-century Begova mosque, sparked violence. From 1872 onward there was resistance to Ottoman tax gatherers, with peasants arming themselves and taking refuge in nearby Montenegro. The local authorities responded, as they usually did,