WHERE'S THE EXAGGERATION?

Actually, the The Massacre of Chios does not show the 50,000 butchered fathers and husbands; it does not reveal the women and children being enslaved, raped, and murdered; it does not depict the Island of Chios reduced to ashes. And certainly . . . we don't hear their screams and cries!

The following editorial was excerpted from a long report in The Times of London, 11 September 1822. The FULL report can be seen in the forthcoming book, Before the Silence: Archival News Reports of the Christian Holocaust That Begs To Be Remembered. Researched and Presented by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos, Foreword by Dennis R. Papazian, Ph.D.

THE TIMES, LONDON,
Wednesday, September 11, 1822

EDITORIALS, P. 2 Issue 11661

Many details of the horrible barbarities committed by the Turks at Scio [Chios] have already been laid before the public. We refer to a paragraph in the German papers, where will be found, in few words, the amount and effect of those barbarities. A population of 120,000 souls has been reduced to to about 900! and of them a considerable portion were dying every day of pestilence produced by multitudes of unburied corpses. The most beautiful and flourishing island of the Archipelago is a desert. The most civilized, cultivated, and interesting people, the flower of Greece have been the greater part, exterminated-the residue expatriated, or sold for slaves by the unbelieving butchers of their kindred. Yet acts like these were palliated, and by Englishmen: these acts were all but justified in Parliament, as being provoked, or at least irritated by the Greeks. When did the Greeks deliberately and indiscriminately massacre the male inhabitants of an entire province? When did the Greeks carry off tens of thousands of defenceless women and innocent children, to glut their base avarice, or other execrable passions? Will the destruction of a faithless garrison, after a storm which its treachery had invited, be alleged as an equivalent for laying Scio [Chios] in ashes, and burying fifty thousand fathers, and husbands in the ruins of their own peaceful habitations? The subject will not bear to be softened-nor to be thought of: but we have reasonable fear that the disposition which could look with calmness, nay with approbation, at such horrors has not been confined to their defenders in the British Parliament. So far as can be judged from late advices, a spirit, which practically speaking, is one of direct alliance and co-operation which the destroyers of the Sciot [Chiote] race, now actuates the counsels of more than one Christian Sovereign. We subjoin a letter from Smyrna, containing intelligence that the Austrian Government has enjoined its naval commanders in the Archipelago to resist and violate the maritime blockade which the Greeks have established before certain of the Turkish harbours. Now, legitimate Powers, who stand upon law, ought to pay some respect to the recognized law of nations. Here were Greeks, at open war for their existence, besieging some of the maritime fortresses of their enemies, and investing others by sea and land. . .

Transcribed for educational and archival purposes only. -SKK