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The President of the Turkish Republic, if it can now be called a democracy since it is a democracy only by name and his authority nightmarishly approaches the absolute power of a dictator (or a Sultan in his case), lately mentions the glorious victory of the Turkish army in 1922. Obviously, this happens because it's a century since then, but does he have to look a little better at the circumstances to understand what he is saying?

Is he proud of the victory in 1922? But which army did Turkey defeat? The one who, for ten years and three wars, had never lost to the Turkish army? The Greek army had defeated the Turkish army totally in the First Balkan War, in the First World War and the Asia Minor Campaign many times and had never been defeated. Did Turkey defeat this army? Of course not; they defeated an army that was exhausted after ten years of war, with shortages of logistics and supplies, with old equipment that again fought bravely but could not prevail.

He will throw us, he says, back into the sea like then. But they did not throw the Greek army into the sea. They threw thousands of defenceless civilians. Does Mr Erdogan know how many his "heroic" soldiers had slaughtered then? Six hundred thousand were lost, some slaughtered in Smyrna and other cities and others by forced labour in the "amele tabourou," the labour battalions organized by the Turks. A century later, no one knows the exact number or identity of these people. Families broke up and never learned what happened to their own.

Mr Erdogan remembers this glorious past as a true descendant of the barbarians who came from the steppes and plunged into blood all over the Near East, destroying centuries-old civilization, replacing the law with violence and human dignity with the most brutal slavery. Maybe it would be better to remember the basics of culture and prosperity and not the plans of the medieval sultans; anyway, he will not be allowed to carry them out, especially when they mean that he will take even one stone from Greek soil!