Ummmm...Ahhhh....
From Sputnik (Russian state media), August 27:
The Turkish Foreign Ministry is calling on France to acknowledge the consequence of its colonial past without blaming other nations, ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said on Saturday.
According to Turkish media, during his recent visit to Algeria, French President Emmanuel Macron claimed the existence of networks in Turkey, Russia and China that demonstrate neocolonialist and imperialist aspirations and act against France in Africa."We hope that France will reach as soon as possible the maturity to face its colonial past without blaming other countries, including Turkey," Bilgic said in a statement.The ministry stressed that Macron's remarks against Turkey were unacceptable and drew attention to the developing beneficial relations between Algeria and Turkey."If France supposes that there are reactions against it in the African continent, it should search for the source of these reactions in its colonial past and its efforts to still pursue this with different methods and it must try to repair it," the document read, adding that "to claim that these reactions are caused by the activities of third countries, instead of confronting and solving the problems related to their own past, is not only to deny a sociological phenomenon and history, but also reflects the distorted mentality of some politicians."....
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Leaving aside the whole Constantinople in 1453 thing and the Gates of Vienna in 1683, I have to think the Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Cossacks and a whole bunch of other folks might have some thoughts on the issue of colonialism:
map credit: History.com
It's almost as ludicrous as a British Establishment mouthpiece complaining about someone soft-colonizing Africa.
Oh wait.
That China has made huge diplomatic, commercial and strategic inroads in Africa is news to no one. That Russia has done so barely without spending a rouble is less known. Yet over the past decade, and at an accelerating pace, Moscow has built a formidable presence in many of the continent’s 54 countries. Its influence is overwhelmingly malign.
Russia’s stealth campaign began more than a decade ago when it used ties, forged during the Soviet era, to reactivate relations. The Soviet Union is fondly remembered in countries such as Angola, Mozambique and South Africa for being on the right side of history when politicians in the west were condemning liberation leaders, including Nelson Mandela, as terrorists....—Financial Times editorial board, September 4, 2022
Everyone has a skeleton or two twenty-million in the closet.
Here's some of the history of the guy Erdoğan rather fancies he emulates, Suleiman the Magnificent:
—Via The E. Darin Smith Collection, Richmond, VA
And by-the-bye, August 27: "France has withdrawn its final troops from Mali" (but what about the lithium?)
