My friend Tom MacMaster recently told me about something I did not know: the Sun Language Theory, which “makes Nazi race theory look sane.” Wikipedia:

The Sun Language Theory (Turkish: Güneş Dil Teorisi) was a Turkish nationalist pseudoscientific linguistic hypothesis developed in Turkey in the 1930s that proposed that all human languages are descendants of one proto-Turkic primal language. The theory proposed that because this primal language had close phonemic resemblances to Turkish, all other languages can essentially be traced back to Turkic roots. According to the theory, the Central Asian worshippers, who wanted to salute the omnipotence of the sun and its life-giving qualities, had done so by transforming their meaningless blabbering into a coherent set of ritual utterings, and language was born, hence the name.

The article further states that “the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, not only gave the theory official backing and material support, but also was himself a very important contributor to its development.” 

Part of me admires how the Turks take pride in themselves and their country. But I confess that I find this sort of thing (others: Erdogan’s theory that the Turks made it to the New World in 1178, or the denial of a certain genocide carried out under cover of World War I) utterly baffling.

Is it simply not possible to value your country, and the truth, simultaneously?