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Tuesday 23 June 2020

Twice a Stranger - Bruce Clark

Subtitled:  How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.

An excellent account of this whole historical episode.  It gives the background and the historical information in detail, but not too much.  It also includes many personal reminiscences of the experience from older people on both sides of the divide, as well as acute observations from the author made during his travels in both countries.
The end result is a complex picture of a complex set of experiences which tends to counter the more absolute mythology around the expulsions and the events leading up to them. 

One interesting passage can be found on pp. 193 - 195, recounting the political moves of the CHP around the opposition that was critical of the government's corruption and inefficiency in dealing with the population exchange.  In the end, the leaders of the opposition were accused of being disloyal and imprisoned and eventually executed during the aftermath of the Kurdish uprising shortly after the population exchange.  The press was also so suppressed.  The ruling party even maintained they had aborted an assassination attempt on Atatürk   This is, of course, the identical playbook that Erdoğan has used - the Ergenkon case, as well as the whole Fetah Gülen story.  Various aspects of the Turkish managing of the population exchange make it clear that this collusion between the ruling party and the big business elite is built into the DNA of the Turkish Republic.  In a way, it is a continuation of the relationship between the Sultan and the non-Muslim elites of the late Ottoman Empire - a favoured business elite with special rapport with the government and which is allowed to enrich itself in exchange for money and favours...   As usual, nations have a very hard time changing their political DNA;  they just swap round the power brokers and the business elite groups.

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