.E `°="justify">There must be subjects that you also find nauseating and revolting. There is a so-called problem with which we are confronted continually, but this issue has no content at all. It is an empty shell. It is like a strange building that has no foundation but still goes up and up with the addition of new materials on it. It has no structure, let alone any beauty. It is an apparition consisting of nightmares made up for a purpose. The original lie has been boosted with many more lies. With repetition each lie has started to gain the intensity of truth. Small lies have turned into big lies. Those who believe these lies have come to hate those who do not, accusing them of denying the facts. Then those watching the developments from a distance started to support the party that is causing so much turmoil, making such a noise in its zeal to uphold this bundle of lies -- sometimes out of pity and sometimes to cover up their own lies. They have even attempted to ban debates on this subject because they think it would be too dangerous to have discussions on whether the allegation is a lie.

  There must be subjects that you also find nauseating and revolting. There is a so-called problem with which we are confronted continually, but this issue has no content at all. It is an empty shell. It is like a strange building that has no foundation but still goes up and up with the addition of new materials on it. It has no structure, let alone any beauty. It is an apparition consisting of nightmares made up for a purpose. The original lie has been boosted with many more lies. With repetition each lie has started to gain the intensity of truth. Small lies have turned into big lies. Those who believe these lies have come to hate those who do not, accusing them of denying the facts. Then those watching the developments from a distance started to support the party that is causing so much turmoil, making such a noise in its zeal to uphold this bundle of lies -- sometimes out of pity and sometimes to cover up their own lies. They have even attempted to ban debates on this subject because they think it would be too dangerous to have discussions on whether the allegation is a lie.

  How will the story end? Psychoanalysis is difficult enough even when the subject is an individual. So how can you cure the pathology when it takes entire societies hostage?

  As Jesus Christ was painfully climbing the path to Golgotha where he was to be crucified, carrying a heavy cross on his back, people gathering along the path shouted insults, spitting on him. According to the Bible, Christ, whispering, asked God to forgive these people because they did not know what they were doing. In more recent times, some of those embracing the religion of Christ came to commit some incredibly evil deeds without knowing what they were doing. The outcome of the vote in the French National Assembly shows that they still do not know what they are doing.

  The majority of the French people believe -- just as the other European peoples do -- that Turks subjected the Armenians to genocide. They believe this to be a fact and they want us to confess, just as Jacques Chirac's France had done (whether sincerely or ostensibly) regarding the slave trade, the exploitation of colonies, the Algerian massacres and the Holocaust. In reality, contrary to common belief, France is not acknowledging the full dimensions of the crimes it committed in the past and it is not apologizing for them. In fact, it is merely bargaining with history.

  As an official of the Vichy government, Maurice Papon was tried for sending 1,600 Jews to the Nazis' Drancy Camp and condemned not for taking part in genocide but for crimes against humanity. And he was 84 years old when the trial took place in 1998 though his crimes had been no secret all along. During the de Gaulle era he was made the police chief of Paris and he was the person who threw into Seine and drowned 200 (according to his own testimony only 80) Algerian youths for staging a peaceful demonstration in Paris in 1961. As if that were not enough, he was made finance minister by Giscard d'Estaing. Rene Bousquet, another French official who had contributed to the Holocaust at a higher level than Papon, was actually a friend of Francois Mitterrand who had been, like him, an official of the Vichy government. He committed suicide (?) when his deeds were revealed. Meanwhile, the Church for years hid a Nazi named Paul Touvier. Furthermore, France has passed a law that claims colonialism had in fact contributed to civilization and rejects the accusation that it had committed genocide in Algeria.

  Racist Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen competed against Chirac in the second round of balloting in the latest election in France. Other parties that wanted to stem the rise of the racist movement have found themselves sliding towards the extreme right first in their rhetoric and then in their actions. The all-too-fragmented French party system and public opinion is sliding increasingly towards xenophobic and racist views. Opinion polls indicate that now two-thirds of the French people openly admit -- as if it were a merit -- that they are racist.

  Due to their racist approach, the French have proven unable to integrate the Muslim diaspora in the country into French society. The Muslims, who live in ghettos and have a high unemployment rate (50 percent), whose only contact with the state is limited to their encounters with the police, rebelled last year. Almost all French people, the political elite and a great part of the media, placed the blame for those incidents on the Muslims.

  Under the circumstances, those in Turkey who keep referring to the French Revolution and to the Enlightenment, still seeing France as the cradle of democracy and freedoms, are merely failing to keep up with developments. Similarly, it would be better if we left aside the fallacy that Turkey and France have been friends for centuries.

  France is failing to make even the reforms needed on a day-to-day basis. It is getting old. With a pathological egotism it is shrinking inward. It is afraid of losing its position in the European Union and in the world.

  Unable to come to terms with its past and its present situation, France needed a target group onto which it would project its hate, anxiety and worst fears. And it has found that target group in Turkey. In reality, Turks have been France's other throughout history.

  This kind of France cannot bear to have us become an EU member. Let's have pity on France and let's abandon our bid for EU membership.