Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 211, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 September 1916 — Some Mysteries of Turkish Censorship Are Explained [ARTICLE]

Some Mysteries of Turkish Censorship Are Explained

In all letters from America the Turkish censor seemed to take the most personal interest, writes Arthur Ruhl In Collier’s. At the end of one letter of mine from New York he wrote in pencil: “Please not so long. —Censor.” One day I hqd the pleasure of meeting him, or at least that part of him which handled English correspondence—an Oxford Turk who could speak English as wpll as anybody. “Fancy,” said he, “a woman takes a donkey ride over In Anatolia somewhere, and writes her husband sixteen pages about It. Well, now, no one could read that!” So his young men read the first page and the last, and the rest they simply lifted out and—into the waste basket! This explained it —those curious letters people had been getting with a start and a finish and the rest all gone. Imagine yourself, for instance, separated by five thousand miles and a continent covered with war from those you care about most and then getting a letter: T feel it my duty to tell you the real truth. . . •” then a gap and the conclusion: “If you act at puce, there may still be time. Yours sincerely. . . .” It wasn’t that the censor objected to the middle of the letter, but there wasn’t time to wade through all, and he merely sent what he could read.