Selective memory in nation-building is not an accident of history but a deliberate political strategy. States construct identity by choosing which events to commemorate and which to silence, shaping a coherent narrative that supports legitimacy and unity.
Through education systems, public rituals, and legal frameworks, inconvenient truths are often erased or softened to maintain national cohesion.
Yet this process carries consequences. The suppression of difficult histories does not eliminate them; it delays their return. As global connectivity exposes hidden pasts, selective memory becomes increasingly unstable, challenging the very identities it was designed to protect and forcing societies to confront unresolved truths.
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The Politics of Forgetting
In 2010, officials at the UK Border Agency fed thousands of Windrush landing cards into an industrial shredder. The cards were the only documentary proof that Caribbean migrants invited to Britain in the postwar decades to rebuild a war-damaged economy had arrived legally.
Their destruction was not accidental. It was administrative. And it rendered tens of thousands of British citizens legally invisible, stripping them of healthcare, employment, and in some cases their right to remain in the country they had called home for half a century. The British government described it as a records management decision. It was, in fact, a memory policy.
This blog argues that such acts are not exceptional; they are structural. Selective memory functions not as distortion but as deliberate political technology: a mechanism through which states engineer cohesive “imagined communities” by systematically erasing or sanitising histories that complicate national legitimacy. The short-term yield is stability and unity.
The long-term cost of intergenerational trauma, democratic erosion, and populist resurgence accumulates silently until suppressed truths resurface in forms the state can no longer control. The blog proceeds in four movements: theoretical foundations, mechanisms of implementation, comparative case studies, and the broader implications of forgetting in an era of digital connectivity and democratic fragility.
Memory as a Political Instrument
The study of collective memory begins with a deceptively simple observation made by Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s: memory is not primarily an individual phenomenon but a social one. We remember through and within groups: families, communities, institutions, and nations, and those groups actively shape what is retained, what is emphasised, and what is allowed to fade.
For Halbwachs, there is no unmediated access to the past; every act of remembering is a reconstruction, filtered through the frameworks the present provides. States understand this intuitively. Schools, monuments, national holidays, museums, and official commemorations are not merely cultural amenities; they are the infrastructure through which collective memory is produced and maintained. To control that infrastructure is to control the terms on which citizens understand who they are and where they come from.
Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?” pushes this further, and more uncomfortably. For Renan, forgetting and even what he calls “historical error” is not incidental to nation-building but foundational to it. Every nation requires a simplified, legible story of shared origin, and that story can only be told by suppressing the violence, division, and contingency through which the nation was actually forged.
The unity of France required forgetting the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; the unity of Britain required forgetting the Highland Clearances. Renan presents this as a political necessity. What he inadvertently reveals is a structural fragility: if nations are built on managed historical fictions, they are epistemically vulnerable from the moment of their construction. The forgetting that creates them also creates the conditions for their eventual destabilisation.
Paul Connerton provides the most useful typology for understanding how this forgetting operates in practice. He distinguishes between commemorative practices, the rituals, ceremonies, and habits through which a community actively reinforces its memory, and repressive erasure, the censorship, archival destruction, and legal prohibition through which inconvenient memories are actively suppressed.
Both are forms of state memory management, but they operate through opposite logics: one by filling the cultural space with authorised content, the other by evacuating it of unauthorised content. In practice, they work in combination: states simultaneously promote the memories they want and suppress the memories they do not.
Michel Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth” sharpens the political stakes of this analysis. For Foucault, knowledge and power are not separate domains; they are mutually constitutive. Institutions that control what counts as legitimate knowledge control what counts as political reality. Applied to historical memory, this means that the question of what happened in the past is never purely historical; it is always also a question of who has the authority to say what happened, and whose version of events is permitted to circulate in public life.
The state’s management of historical memory is, in Foucauldian terms, a form of epistemic governance: not merely managing information but shaping the conditions under which truth can be produced and recognised.
Jan and Aleida Assmann extend this framework by distinguishing between communicative memory, the living, generational memory of those who experienced events directly, typically lasting two to three generations, and cultural memory, the institutionalised, mythologised memory encoded in texts, rituals, monuments, and official histories, which can persist across centuries.
State-driven selective memory operates primarily at the level of cultural memory, which explains both its durability and its particular vulnerability: when communicative memory, living testimony, contradicts the cultural memory installed by the state, the resulting tension is acutely destabilising.
This is precisely why authoritarian states are so anxious to silence survivors and witnesses, and why the death of the last generation of direct witnesses to an atrocity often triggers renewed contestation over the cultural memory that replaced their testimony.
Psychological research adds a further dimension. Studies of national memory demonstrate that collective historical narratives serve identitarian functions beyond simple patriotism: they provide origin myths that anchor contemporary identity, victimhood narratives that justify present-day grievances, and narrative templates through which individuals locate themselves within a larger story.
Nations do not merely record their pasts; they curate them to meet psychological needs, selecting memories that reinforce group cohesion and discarding those that threaten it. This is not cynical in every instance; the need for a coherent collective identity is genuine. But it creates a systematic bias toward self-flattering, self-unifying narratives and a systematic aversion to histories that introduce moral complexity or internal division.
Finally, it is essential to resist the implication that memory is simply imposed from above. Memory is a field of contestation. Diaspora communities, activist historians, oral traditions, subaltern communities, and increasingly digital networks all generate counter-memories that challenge state narratives.
The relationship between official memory and counter-memory is dynamic and recursive: the state responds to emerging counter-memories by intensifying suppression; suppression generates further resistance; resistance amplifies awareness. Understanding this dynamic is essential to understanding why selective forgetting so often defeats itself.
The core argument of this framework can be stated plainly: selective forgetting is not passive amnesia. It is an active, ongoing, institutionally maintained strategy that prioritises “usable pasts” over historical fidelity, producing mythic unity at the cost of pluralism. And it operates on borrowed time. The rigidity of the erasure is directly proportional to the destabilising force of the return.
Mechanisms of Selective Forgetting in Nation-Building
If theory establishes that memory is constructed and power-laden, the question becomes operational: through what precise mechanisms do states translate that construction into political reality? Four principal mechanisms can be identified, each operating at a different register of social life.
The first is the production of official narratives, the most visible and institutionally embedded mechanism. Textbooks, national curricula, commemorative monuments, state-funded museums, and national holidays all function as what Jan Assmann calls “cultural memory charters”: authoritative versions of the past that crowd out alternatives not through explicit censorship but through sheer institutional weight.
Post-war France provides a paradigmatic example. For decades, the dominant national narrative presented France as a nation of resisters embodied in the mythology of the Free French and the Resistance, while the extent of collaboration with Nazi occupation under the Vichy regime was minimised, euphemised, and structurally absent from public education. This was not a conspiracy; it was an institutional consensus, reinforced across schools, political parties, and public culture, that prioritised national reconstruction over historical reckoning.
The second mechanism is legal silencing, the use of law to criminalise or constrain unauthorised versions of the past. Turkey’s Article 301, which criminalises “insulting Turkishness” and has been used to prosecute historians and journalists who describe the 1915 Armenian massacres as genocide, is the most internationally visible contemporary example.
But legal silencing takes more subtle forms: the classification of archival documents, the withdrawal of public funding from revisionist historical projects, and the legal framing of certain historical claims as defamatory. Notably, Germany’s memory laws operate through the opposite logic, compelling remembrance of the Holocaust rather than suppressing it, which reveals that legal intervention in memory is not inherently repressive: it is a tool whose political valence depends entirely on what it is designed to remember or forget.
The third mechanism is cultural amnesia, the most pervasive and the hardest to contest precisely because it operates through omission rather than assertion. Where legal silencing says “you cannot say this,” cultural amnesia simply ensures that certain histories never enter mainstream circulation.
American school textbooks have historically minimised or sanitised the violence of chattel slavery and the near-extermination of Native American populations, not through explicit prohibition but through curricular choices about what merits inclusion and emphasis.
British popular culture has sustained a vision of empire as adventure and civilisation-building, while the structural violence, famine, extraction, detention, and torture remained largely absent from public consciousness. Omission is a particularly effective form of memory management because it is self-concealing: citizens cannot contest a history they have never been told existed.
The fourth mechanism is commemorative ritual, the use of selective anniversaries, national ceremonies, and mythologised historical narratives to create what might be called a heroic temporal arc: a story of the nation moving through adversity toward greatness.
Britain’s “Blitz Spirit”, the mythology of national unity, stoicism, and democratic resilience in the face of Nazi bombing, performs this function precisely. It is not that the Blitz did not involve genuine courage and community solidarity; it did. But the mythology abstracts these qualities from their specific historical context and transforms them into timeless national characteristics, available for rhetorical deployment whenever national unity needs to be asserted.
The “Global Britain” rhetoric of the Brexit era drew directly on this commemorative repertoire, conjuring an image of Britain as a naturally outward-facing, trading, sovereign nation, an image only coherent because the violent infrastructure of the empire that once made British global reach possible had been largely excised from public memory.
These four mechanisms rarely operate in isolation. They are most powerful in combination, and their combined effect is to produce what Kerwin Klein calls “usable pasts”: versions of history calibrated to meet present-day political and psychological needs.
At the national scale, the logic resembles Freudian repression: what is excluded from official memory does not disappear but is displaced, generating cognitive dissonance, compensatory mythologising, and eventual backlash.
The principle that emerges from this analysis is the blog’s central analytical claim: the more rigid the forgetting, the more destabilising the return. States that construct their legitimacy on the suppression of inconvenient history are not purchasing stability; they are deferring a reckoning whose eventual cost compounds with each year of delay.
Case Studies: Forgetting in Action
These mechanisms are not theoretical abstractions. They operate with measurable political consequences in specific national contexts. The cases of Turkey and Britain illuminate complementary aspects of the politics of forgetting: one characterised by overt, legally enforced denial; the other by a subtler but no less consequential cultural and administrative amnesia.
Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
In the spring of 1915, as the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in the First World War deepened, the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turk leadership, initiated the systematic deportation and massacre of Armenians from Anatolia.
The historical consensus among scholars, and the official position of over thirty states, is that what followed constitutes genocide: the deliberate killing of between six hundred thousand and over one million Armenians, alongside the destruction of Armenian cultural and community life across the region. The Turkish state has maintained, continuously and officially, that this consensus is false.
The official Turkish narrative frames the events of 1915 as wartime disorder, the tragic but mutual suffering of multiple communities in conditions of war and communal conflict, rather than as organised, targeted extermination.
This position has been sustained through a comprehensive architecture of memory management. Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code criminalises public statements deemed to insult “the Turkish nation,” a provision that has been used to prosecute Orhan Pamuk, Elif Şafak, and the historian Taner Akçam, among others, for statements acknowledging the genocide.
State educational curricula present the period through the lens of Ottoman victimhood and Armenian collaboration with Russia. Diplomatic pressure is routinely applied to foreign governments considering formal recognition, and Turkey has periodically suspended diplomatic relations with states, including France and Canada, that have legislated recognition.
Under Erdoğan, this denial has acquired an additional ideological layer. Neo-Ottoman nostalgia, the celebration of Ottoman civilisation as a glorious, multi-ethnic, and righteous imperial order, coexists with the denial of the empire’s final atrocity, producing a selective glorification that requires the genocide’s erasure as its precondition. The past is simultaneously glorified and expurgated: Ottoman greatness is remembered; Ottoman violence against Armenians is not.
The paradox of this strategy is that it has intensified rather than contained the counter-memory it seeks to suppress. The Armenian diaspora, dispersed across France, the United States, Russia, Lebanon, and elsewhere, has transformed local memory into a globally networked and institutionally persistent force.
Armenian community organisations have lobbied legislatures across four continents; Armenian-American political networks have made recognition a recurrent issue in American presidential campaigns; the International Association of Genocide Scholars has provided academic legitimacy to the consensus that Turkey’s legal apparatus seeks to criminalise.
Each prosecution under Article 301 generates international press coverage that disseminates the suppressed claim far more widely than silence would. In this case, suppression has functioned as amplification.
The consequences are significant and ongoing. Turkey’s candidacy for European Union membership has been substantially complicated by its memory politics; the relationship with Armenia remains one of the region’s most intractable diplomatic impasses; and within Turkey itself, a generation of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals has been legally harassed for engaging honestly with their own history.
The Armenian genocide case demonstrates with unusual clarity the structural logic of rigid forgetting: the state has committed enormous political capital to a denial that is internationally untenable, creating a compounding vulnerability that grows rather than diminishes with time.
Britain: Imperial Amnesia and the Architecture of Absence
Britain’s relationship with its imperial past operates through a different logic, one that is in some respects more insidious precisely because it is less visible. Where Turkey’s memory politics involve explicit denial and legal enforcement, Britain’s involve something closer to structural absence: the empire is not so much defended as disappeared, rendered invisible in mainstream public culture and education in a way that forecloses critical engagement without requiring explicit suppression.
It is important at the outset to distinguish two modes of imperial forgetting that are often conflated. Nostalgia glorifies a sanitised empire: Churchill as an unambiguous hero; the Commonwealth as a family of nations voluntarily gathered around British civilisation; “Global Britain” as a coherent post-Brexit identity rooted in a natural talent for trade and diplomacy.
Amnesia operates differently: it erases the empire’s violence almost entirely, so that the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which between two and three million people died, exacerbated by policies of the Churchill governmentis unknown to the majority of British citizens, and the systematic torture and detention of tens of thousands of Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s remained officially unacknowledged until 2013.
These are not competing strategies. They are sequential and complementary. Amnesia removes the violence from the historical record; nostalgia fills the resulting vacuum with pride, adventure, and civilizational mission. Together, they produce a stable, internally coherent identity built on an absence.
The mechanism is: erase, then replace, then stabilise. Imperial amnesia and Churchillian nostalgia are not alternatives; they are two phases of a single operation. The violence is excised so that the glory can be inhabited without contradiction.
The Brexit campaign of 2016 illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. The rhetorical architecture of “take back control” and “Global Britain” drew on a mythologised vision of British sovereignty and global reach that was only coherent because the violent infrastructure of the empire that once underwrote British global power had been largely forgotten.
A nation that remembered the Bengal Famine and the Mau Mau detention camps clearly would struggle to narrate its imperial history as primarily a story of trade, civilisation, and voluntary association. The amnesia made the nostalgia available; the nostalgia made the political project legible.
The Windrush scandal, which broke publicly in 2018, eight years after the shredding of the landing cards, is the point at which this architecture of forgetting made direct contact with human lives. Caribbean citizens who had lived and worked in Britain for decades found themselves unable to prove their legal right to remain; some were detained; others were deported to countries they had not seen since childhood.
The scandal revealed that the “hostile environment” immigration policy introduced under Theresa May was not merely administratively careless; it was the product of a political culture in which the history of the Windrush generation’s invited migration had been so thoroughly excised from public consciousness that policymakers could, apparently in good faith, treat these citizens as illegitimate. Forgetting had become policy.
Counter-memories have emerged through Afro-Caribbean community organisations, the Rhodes Must Fall movement’s challenges to commemorative culture, postcolonial scholarship reaching wider audiences through writers such as Sathnam Sanghera and Caroline Elkins, and a sustained public debate about the contents of history curricula. But the structural asymmetry remains: counter-memories operate against the grain of institutions that were built to sustain a different version of the past, and the effort required to sustain them is considerably greater than the institutional inertia they oppose.
Comparative Analysis
Set against each other, Turkey and Britain reveal the range within which selective forgetting operates and the common logic that underlies that range. Both states have deployed what Foucault would recognise as “regimes of truth”: institutional architectures that determine which versions of the past are permitted to circulate as legitimate historical knowledge.
Both have achieved degrees of short-term national cohesion at the cost of long-term fracture. And both are now confronted with the compounding consequences of rigidity: counter-memories that are more networked, more persistent, and more politically consequential than the strategies designed to suppress them could anticipate.
The differences are equally instructive. Turkey employs overt, legally enforced denial, a high-stakes strategy that concentrates political capital on a single, internationally contested claim, and whose visibility makes it uniquely vulnerable to the amplification paradox: the more strenuously the denial is enforced, the more attention it draws to what is being denied.
Britain employs softer cultural and administrative amnesia, harder to challenge precisely because it operates through omission rather than assertion, and because it requires no explicit claim that can be directly contradicted. Different mechanisms reflect different assessments of threat: Turkey’s denial is existential to its founding republican mythology; Britain’s amnesia is more diffuse, permitting selective acknowledgement of imperial history without structural reckoning.
A brief comparative reference to Germany’s Erinnerungskultur, its institutionalised culture of Holocaust remembrance, illuminates what the alternative looks like. Germany has made compelled, sustained confrontation with its worst history a foundational element of democratic education and public culture.
The process has not been without tensions: critics argue that institutionalised remembrance can become formulaic, crowding out living moral engagement in favour of a ritual performance of contrition. But Germany’s experience demonstrates that democratic polities can absorb honest historical reckoning without political collapse and that the reckoning, when genuinely undertaken, tends to strengthen rather than undermine the democratic institutions built in its aftermath.
Implications and Critiques: The Cost of Forgetting
These cases reveal the consequences of selective forgetting. But before cataloguing those consequences, it is worth acknowledging that managed memory is not always straightforwardly harmful. In the context of transitional justice, the political challenge of building stable societies after civil war, mass atrocity, or authoritarian rule, some degree of strategic amnesia has been argued to serve genuine goods.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its limitations, prioritised acknowledgement and conditional amnesty over prosecution, on the grounds that retributive justice would fracture a society already at the edge of civil conflict.
Spain’s post-Franco “Pact of Forgetting”, the tacit agreement across political parties to refrain from pursuing accountability for Francoist crimes during the democratic transition, was widely credited with preventing the kind of political violence that had destabilised earlier transitions.
These cases do not vindicate erasure, but they complicate any simple narrative in which forgetting is always and purely destructive. Context matters; the costs and benefits of memory management are not uniform across political situations.
With that caveat established, the long-term consequences of rigid selective forgetting are severe and compounding.
The most immediately visible contemporary consequence is populist resurgence. Suppressed or strategically instrumentalised memories are among the most powerful resources available to populist political movements.
Viktor Orbán’s reconstruction of Hungarian national identity around the trauma of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory, provides a paradigmatic example. The Trianon trauma is real; the grievance it generated was historically significant. But Orbán’s memory politics have transformed it into something else: a permanent mobilising wound that justifies democratic backsliding, institutional capture, and the redefinition of Hungarian identity in terms that systematically exclude Roma, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Memory here is not merely curated but weaponised, and the weapon is pointed inward as much as outward. The connection between selective memory and democratic erosion is structural, not coincidental: authoritarian consolidation frequently begins with the seizure of historical narrative, precisely because controlling the past is the most durable form of controlling the present.
Intergenerational trauma represents a second category of consequence, one that operates at the psychological rather than the political register but with significant political effects. Research across Holocaust survivor communities, post-colonial populations, and indigenous communities subjected to forced assimilation consistently demonstrates that silenced histories do not remain silent within families and communities.
They are transmitted through affect, through behavioural patterns, through unexplained absences in family narratives across generations, surfacing as unresolved grief, identity fractures, and political anger whose origins are not always consciously recognised by those who carry them. The political anger of communities whose histories have been suppressed is often described by those whose histories have not as disproportionate or inexplicable. It is neither: it is the accumulated cost of forgetting, presented for payment to a generation that did not incur the original debt.
The erosion of democratic pluralism is a third consequence, and in some respects the most foundational. A polity constructed around a singular, sanitised national narrative is epistemically ill-equipped to manage genuine political disagreement.
Citizens habituated to one authorised story, one in which the nation’s identity is coherent, morally legible, and fundamentally benign, are poorly prepared for the encounter with historical complexity that democratic life, honestly conducted, requires. The capacity to hold multiple, conflicting perspectives simultaneously; to recognise that one’s community has been both victim and perpetrator; to extend political imagination across lines of difference; these are cognitive and moral capacities that selective forgetting atrophies systematically.
The digital counter-memory revolution has fundamentally altered the cost-benefit calculus of state memory management, and this may be the most important contemporary development this blog addresses. States have historically relied on control over archives, educational institutions, and broadcast media to maintain their memory monopolies.
That control is structurally eroding. Diaspora networks transform local counter-memories into globally persistent forces: the Armenian diaspora’s international advocacy is sustained by a digital communication infrastructure that no single state can suppress. Archival accessibility means that documents governments assumed were buried, colonial administrative records, declassified intelligence files, and intercepted communications are now searchable, shareable, and available to researchers and journalists across the world.
Caroline Elkins’ work on the Mau Mau detention camps, which forced Britain’s formal acknowledgement of systematic torture in 2013, was built on archival research that colonial-era officials had assumed would remain inaccessible.
Most significantly, legal suppression now often functions as amplification. When Turkey prosecutes a novelist under Article 301, the international press reports the prosecution and, in doing so, disseminates the claim that the prosecution was designed to suppress an audience orders of magnitude larger than the original readership.
In the digital age, suppression accelerates visibility. This does not mean that counter-memories always prevail; state memory management retains considerable power, particularly in closed political systems, but it does mean that the strategy is becoming progressively more costly and less reliable as the information environment evolves.
A society habituated to forgetting its own violence does not become peaceful; it becomes structurally unable to recognise violence when it recurs. This is the insight that Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and specifically her concept of the “banality of evil,” contributes to this analysis: the normalisation of atrocity is not only a psychological phenomenon; it is a product of managed historical ignorance at scale.
Citizens who have not been taught to recognise the forms that political violence takes in their own national history are poorly equipped to identify its recurrence. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of “agonistic pluralism” suggests the alternative: rather than managing contestation through a unified narrative that suppresses disagreement, democratic politics should institutionalise it. Applied to memory, this means acknowledging that multiple, conflicting historical memories coexist within any polity, and that this conflict, properly held and honestly engaged, is a sign of democratic health rather than national fragility.
Conclusion
Nations, Ernest Renan observed, are built on forgetting. What he did not fully reckon with is what they become when the forgotten return.
This blog has argued that selective memory is not an aberration in the life of nation-states but a constitutive feature of them: an active, institutionally maintained strategy through which states engineer the cohesive historical fictions on which national identity depends.
The theoretical framework established by Halbwachs, Connerton, Foucault, and the Assmanns reveals that this engineering is not passive or inevitable but a chosen form of epistemic governance whose political benefits are real but whose costs are deferred rather than avoided.
The mechanisms through which it operates, official narrative, legal silencing, cultural amnesia, and commemorative ritual, work in combination to produce usable pasts that serve short-term political needs while accumulating long-term vulnerabilities. The cases of Turkey and Britain demonstrate these dynamics operating across different political systems and through different mechanisms, converging on a common logic: rigid forgetting generates compounding instability, and the communities whose memories have been suppressed do not forget that they have been forgotten.
The implications reach beyond the historical. In the United States, the debate between the 1619 Project and legislatively mandated “patriotic history” curricula is a live contest over precisely the question this blog has examined: whose memory of the national past is permitted to constitute national identity, and what the cost of exclusion will be.
In Russia, the aggressive historical revisionism used to justify the invasion of Ukraine, the denial of Ukrainian national distinctiveness, and the mythologization of Soviet-era unity represent memory politics deployed as a geopolitical weapon with catastrophic human consequences. In Hungary and Poland, in India and Brazil, in the Philippines and across the post-colonial world, memory is a political battleground whose stakes are immediately democratic.
The prescription this analysis supports is not a naive call for “full disclosure”; historical reckoning is complex, and its political management requires genuine skill and sensitivity. It is, rather, a call for the conditions under which honest historical engagement becomes possible: independent educational institutions protected from political interference; funded public history projects that centre marginalised testimony; transnational historical commissions capable of building shared accounts across national borders; and civic space for counter-memory that is not merely tolerated but genuinely supported.
Truth and Reconciliation processes, when undertaken with genuine commitment rather than managed as political performance, offer partial but real models.
Nations that rely on forgetting may achieve a kind of mythic unity, a clean story, a heroic arc, an identity uncomplicated by the violence through which it was constructed. But they become, in time, strangers to themselves. When the suppressed history returns, and in the digital age, it returns with compounding force; the shock is proportional to the depth of the original erasure. The rigidity of the forgetting is the measure of the destabilisation to come. True political resilience is built not on the management of memory but on the capacity to withstand its return: to look honestly at what was done, in the nation’s name, and to remain a democracy nonetheless.
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