Turkey has to grasp the past to survive (Sunday Herald)

"MY WIFE has no idea where her grandmother was born. Nothing remarkable about that. In the long century of emigres and immigrants, when the ships were arriving or escaping, many people grew vague about half-remembered farmsteads, deserted villages or tenement rooms in forgotten ports. It happened.

My wife is entitled to be a little more precise, though. "No idea", means none, nothing. Not a scrap of evidence. Once upon a time, someone eradicated a large part of her ancestry. This also happened.

Just to ensure that a daughter's daughter would be forever mystified, they spent the best part of the long century insisting, sometimes with extraordinary violence, that no such eradication was ever contemplated. Just to say so is, to them, an outrage. In their country there is a law forbidding traitors, fools, journalists and novelists from mentioning the thing that never happened."