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Article: Mau Mau revisited.(Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya)(Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War and the End of the Empire)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- June 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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All history, it has been said, is contemporary. What is remembered and how it is remembered depends on the axes that people wish to grind.
Whether or not this is always the case, it is clearly sometimes the case. For example, there has been a renewal of interest in Europe recently in the Armenian massacres, although nothing fundamentally new has been discovered about them. It is easy to divine the reason for this renewal of interest: not a sudden upsurge of sympathy for the Armenians of the past, but of anxiety about the possible accession of Turkey to the European Union. The demand that the Turks should recognize their genocidal history as a condition of ...