[BRIEF NOTE] We never, never learn (item of evidence #2)

[rfmcdonald]

From the Anadolu Agency, the article "Lawyer Pekmezci Denounces Pamuk":

Orhan Pekmezci, one of lawyers affiliated with the Kayseri Bar, denounced famous writer Orhan Pamuk to the Chief Prosecutor's Office.

In an interview with the A.A on Friday, Pekmezci said, ''Pamuk formulated baseless allegations against Turkey in an interview with a Swiss newspaper.''

''I strongly condemn Pamuk who said, 'no one can talk about these, but I will tell them. 1 million Armenians and 30 thousand Kurds were killed in Turkey'. He insulted the Republic of Turkey, Turkish parliament and government, and military forces with his words. Also, his statement causes hatred and enmity among people. Therefore, I denounced him to the Chief Prosecutor's Office in Kayseri,'' he added.

Earlier, Pekmezci applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for annulment of decision of the French parliament recognizing so-called Armenian genocide.

From the Gündüz Atan's article for Turkish Daily News, "The nationalist normalization":

In countries (such as Turkey and Russia) suffering from the trauma of moving from one civilization to another, the nihilistic movements that deny national identity flourished within the framework of the Marxist ideology at first. When such a movement appeared at one "end" of the spectrum, political movements based exclusively on national and religious identity appeared on the other "end" as a requirement of the very nature of dialectics.

In our country, while the leftist movement has become "more liberal" since the collapse of communism, it has continued to harbor deep-seated feelings of hate towards the state and towards the national identity, the feelings it had developed due to the traumas it suffered during the Sept. 12 administration. As a result, it has been out of the question for the nationalist movements to lose strength.

The problem is not Orhan Pamuk. The old-leftists-turned-liberals will not be able to avoid triggering nationalistic reactions as long as they consistently consider Turkey to be in the wrong (as they had done during the fight against the PKK) on such issues as Kurdish ethnic nationalism in the EU membership process, the Armenian "genocide" claims, the Greek Cypriot claims in Cyprus and the Greek claims in the Aegean. If they continue to project primitive super-ego qualities to the "state" concept, they will meet with the same nationalist reaction. If they prove to be ostensibly secular but devoid of any religious culture -- let alone any religious beliefs -- the power of the movements based on religion will continue.

I've talked about the Armenian genocide before, last April in "Genocides and Denial", last December critically in relation to the Armenian genocide and Turkey's European Union bid and relating to a nine-thousand-word-long fisking of "Genocides and Denial."

I continue to find it really and profoundly disturbing that in the year 2005, nine decades after the beginning of the slaughter of approximately one million Armenians--the slaughter that Hitler identified as the prototype of the Holocaust with his question, "Who remembers the Armenians?"--one of Turkey's most famous authors can be brought up on criminal charges for speaking the truth about a shameful period in his country's past.

This is a country that wants to join the European Union?

What, I wonder, is the word that means the exact opposite of "brilliant"?