Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize With a new preface by the author In his most powerful and important book, renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton presents a brilliant analysis of the crucial role that German doctors played in the Nazi genocide. Now updated with a new preface, The Nazi Doctors remains the definitive work on the Nazi medical atrocities, a chilling exposé of the banality of evil at its epitome, and a sobering reminder of the darkest side (...) of human nature. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt first argued the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. This text uses Arwndt's insights as a starting point for further investigations into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked.

What has compelled Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of anti-Semitism in Turkey? The dominant historical narrative is that Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire, and then later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then it is hard for us (...) to accept that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians. In this article, the author confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to tease out the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts, but to confront it and come to terms with it. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, the author sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide. (shrink)

The Nuremberg Trial is of paramount importance, first of all, in historic and legal terms, as it laid the foundations for an international justice system that had no precedent in history, but also in linguistic terms, as it marks the very beginning of simultaneous interpretation and the modern profession of interpreting. By analysing the testimonies of those exceptional interpreters who were ensuring the communication in four languages before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, we will highlight the linguistic and (...) technical challenges they were facing as well as the deeply personal struggles they had to overcome, in particular on a psychological and ethical level, while taking part in a worldwide historic event. The aim of this article is to deepen the current state of research on simultaneous interpretation, but above all to pay tribute to these remarkable interpreters and translators who made history with their pioneering work and their legendary accomplishments in Nuremberg.RésuméLe procès de Nuremberg revêt une importance capitale non seulement sur le plan historique et juridique, car il permet de jeter les bases d’une justice internationale sans précédent dans l’histoire, mais aussi sur le plan linguistique, car il marque l’avènement de l’interprétation simultanée et de la profession moderne d’interprète. L’analyse des témoignages de grands interprètes assurant la communication en quatre langues devant le Tribunal Militaire International à Nuremberg nous permet de mettre en exergue des problèmes linguistiques, les difficultés techniques et les obstacles liés à la nature humaine, tant psychologiques qu’éthiques auxquels étaient confrontés les interprètes et les traducteurs assistant à cet événement à l’échelle mondiale. Le présent article vise à approfondir l’état actuel des recherches sur l’interprétation simultanée, mais surtout à rendre hommage aux interprètes et traducteurs pionniers dont le travail remarquable à Nuremberg a marqué l’histoire du métier. (shrink)

A. Dirk Moses’ The Problems of Genocide builds on his decades of work in the field of genocide research. This review article looks at the impact the book has had to date before considering its two key arguments – that genocide’s invention in the 1940s distilled a centuries old ‘language of transgression’, which in turn served to justify and normalise what Moses dubs ‘liberal permanent security’. I conclude by considering the possibilities and limits of ‘conceptual history’.

This content analysis examines the ways that genocide is included in the high school world history content standards of eleven states with legislative mandates requiring genocide education, as well as if the content standards in those states differ from those of states without mandated genocide education. The null curriculum theorizes that the content that is not taught may be as important as what is taught; this lens allows for a nuanced analysis of the ways that (...) class='Hi'>genocide is included and excluded in state standards. The findings suggest that states with legislative mandates requiring genocide education do not necessarily have high school world history content standards that require genocide education. The content standards in states with legislative mandates often omit acts of genocide, refrain from using the term “genocide,” and frame genocides as less important than the Holocaust, perpetuating the null curriculum of genocides. (shrink)

The policy of genocide carried out by Armenian nationalists against Azerbaijanis has a history of more than 200 years. The goal of this insidious policy was the expulsion of Azerbaijani people from their historical lands and the creation of a mythical state of “Great Armenia” in these territories. On March 31, 1918, under the leadership of the Dashnaktsutyun party with the help of the Red Army of Soviet Russia, the Azerbaijani population of Baku was subjected to genocide. (...) The corpses of 57 Muslim women, whose ears and noses were cut off, and their bellies were torn open, were found in one of the neighborhoods in Baku. Armenians threw people alive into water wells, burning ovens, and oil wells, ripped apart pregnant women's bellies with bayonets, killed children with bayonets, nailed babies to walls, raped women, young girls, and old women. They hung men upside down by their legs, cut them in half with swords, crucified some of them on wooden beds, wrapped them in carpets and rugs and burned them alive, cut off people's hands and feet, and forced them to eat their own flesh under bayonets. Wild Armenian gangs burned Muslim clerics in the fire of bonfires lit from the Koran, the holy book of Islam. This was the true face of the Armenian nationalists who loudly shouted about “self-determination”, “autonomy” and “genocide”. The cruelty of Andranik, who made “necklaces” from children’s eyes, and other Armenians, knew no bounds. In March 1918, up to 20 thousand Azerbaijanians in Baku, and in 1917-1920 on the territory of Azerbaijan, more than 400 thousand Azerbaijani people were subjected to “genocide” by the Armenians. As the world ignores these atrocities, they are increasing. (shrink)

Review of Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide, ; Genocide Watch, ; Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, ; Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, ; The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, ; and Why Genocide? The Armenian and Jewish Experiences in Perspective,.

The fact diat die first formal recognition of die crime of genocide (crimen lesae humanitatis) took place at Nuremberg in 1945 is extremely significant. Those who, to quote Adorno, record the extermination camps as “working incidents” in the victorious advance of civilization, or see “the martyrdom of die Jews as an irrelevant episode in the context of universal history,” fail to grasp die dominating trait of twentieth century atrocities: the perverse secularization of die religious motivations of genocide (...) in modern totalitarian political ideologies. The Nazi regime, with its dystopian vision of a hierarchy of races and societies under German hegemony, represented the most complete expression of diis process of total conditioning of the existence of individuals, with all its genocidal potentials. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national (...) subjects and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance--moral, ethical, political--of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. (shrink)

The two books discussed here join a current pushback against the concept of genocide. Nichanian focuses on the Armenian “Aghed” , inferring from his view of that event’s undeniability that “genocide is not a fact” . May’s critique assumes that groups don’t really—“objectively”—exist, as individuals do; thus, genocide—group murder—also has an “as if” quality so far as concerns the group victimized. On the one hand, then, uniqueness and sacralization; on the other hand, reductionism and diffusion. Alas, the (...) historical and moral claims in “defense” of both genocide and “genocide” survive. (shrink)

Taking as a test case biblical texts in which the God of Israel commands the destruction other nations, the present paper defends the legitimacy and the necessity of ethical criticism of the Bible. It takes issue with the suggestions of several contemporary Christian philosophers who have recently defended the view that (in Israel’s early history) God had good and morally sufficient reasons for commanding genocide.

It has been argued, and not without emotional detachment, that the Holocaust is unlike other events in world and Jewish history. Those who offer such arguments also claim that comparisons between events of ethnic cleansing, mass murder and other sorts of criminal behavior are not meant to purvey a kind of moral one-upmanship. The suffering and harm in one instance is as morally repugnant as those in any other instance, whether it is a Jewish child gassed and cremated by (...) the Nazis, a black child lynched in the southern United States, an Armenian child deliberately poisoned in a Turkish hospital, a Ukrainian child starved to death in a Stalinist blockade, a Native American child shot to death by Conquistadors, a Rwandan child hacked to death, or a Bosnian child blown to pieces by a land mine or sniper. (shrink)

The problem of revisionism, or efforts to deny and censor the incontrovertible history of known genocides, is a growing one. It is now clear that denial is inevitably a phase of the genocidal process, extending far beyond the immediate politically expedient denials of governments who are currently engaging in genocidal massacre or have just recently done so—i.e., the Chinese government's abject denials of the killings of some 5,000 in Tiananmen Square, or the Sri Lanka government's denials of the state-organized (...) massacre of 5,000 Tamil. Denials of genocide continue long after the event by a variety of groups and people, including successor governments or successor enemies of the victim people, such as anti-Semites against Jews, Turks against Armenians, and bigots and celebrants of violence and murder of all sorts. But such denials also occur—and this is the most perplexing fact—among a variety of not obviously malevolent people, including intellectuals who, in the process of calling for a better world, effectively exonerate, support, encourage, and participate in denials of a known genocide, implicitly condoning and even celebrating its occurrence, meanings, and portents for the future. This article is an effort to study and analyze this latter phenomenon, which has been little recognized. Together with previous essays on the psychology of more explicit malevolent denials of genocide, the intention is to generate a broader psychological theory of denials of genocide and revisionism by proposing that there are also a variety of “innocent denials” of the factual reality or significance of known cases of genocide, and a variety of “innocent disavowals of violence” which in truth celebrate the violence. These “innocent denials” join with the well-known explicit bigots in creating a vast panorama of dangerous denials of genocides and implicit calls to new genocides in our world. (shrink)

It is a widely shared belief that genocide – the ‘crime of crimes’– is more morally significant than ‘mere’ large-scale mass murder. Various attempts have been made to capture that separate evil of genocide: some have attempted to locate it in damage done to individuals, while others have focused upon the harm done to collectives. In this article, I offer a third, neglected, option. Genocide damages humankind: it is here that the difference is to be found. I (...) show that this understanding has a venerable legal history, and argue that it has the significant benefits of legitimising intervention and justifying universal jurisdiction. (shrink)

Language is a powerful tool that enables communication and shapes our identity and cultural practices. The right to choose one's language is a fundamental human right that helps preserve personal and communal identities. In a multilingual nation like Ethiopia, language goes beyond communication to define administrative boundaries. Consequently, depriving Ethiopians of their linguistic rights becomes a more complex punishment than food embargoes. This research investigated the motives and means by which the Amhara Regional State-enforced a monolingual and monocultural language education (...) policy in western Tigray through the lens of linguistic genocide. The study involved interviews with ten teachers, selected using a snowball sampling method, and document analysis to reinforce the result. Political and economic factors and a desire to promote the assimilation of Tigrayans into Amhara culture and language, a process known as "Amharanization", appear to have impacted the implementation of the language education policy in western Tigray. Authorities have implemented a variety of measures, including bans, restrictions, penalties, enforcement, forced relocation, and even heinous acts, which have caused the Tigrayan community severe physical and psychological distress. Collectively, these policies, actions, and outcomes constituted an act of linguistic genocide. This study sheds light on the severe repercussions of such policies, examines their implications, acknowledges the inherent limitations, and offers valuable recommendations for future research in this crucial area. (shrink)

This paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation and the centrality of official Holocaust memory and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aiming at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to this process. It argues that identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, which assumes it to be static and individual. In doing so, this political approach reproduces the essentialisation of Jewish communities under the banner of Zionism and official (...) state history. The paper aims to show how this process of identification between Judaism, official Holocaust memory and Zionism has been a state-led process, rooted in the historical development of antisemitism and European colonialism. In order to do so, it builds on a critique of classical Marxist analyses of the Jewish question. It finally proposes a more fluid approach to identity, which understands it as socially constructed, contested, and subject to political contestation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The history of spectacle terror lynching remains one of the darkest and least explored political events in American history. In this article, I explore the aesthetic relation of this history to the formation of notions of public action and political assembly. I argue that the history of spectacle terror lynching establishes both a past and present form of public sovereignty. As such, I attempt to examine questions of what public action means with regard to a (...) political context of antiblack violence. I conclude that lynching festivals constitute not only a form of politics but a form of public sovereignty that is still in play in our notion of the public. At heart this notion informs not only antiblack forms of racism but antiblack forms of genocide. (shrink)

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch’s seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch’s formulation of the concept, Vonnegut’s novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian (...) class='Hi'>Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch’s interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer’s reflection on death and violence, man’s destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience (...) and the production of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

This study tackles hashtags as framing devices which shape public arguments and controversies in computer-mediated communication environments. It focuses on the use of the _genocide_ hashtag on Twitter in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. It proposes and showcases a methodology to surface how the semantic and discourse properties of the term genocide affect its framing properties as a hashtag which bears argumentative functions, directly or indirectly calling for action.

In my paper, I document a “travel” journey of concept formation and its concrete expression in law, which also constituted a literal travel journey across continents. Through poetic-hermeneutical approaches to language, guided by previously existing concepts stemming from experiences of the Holocaust, communism, and African-American feminist analyses of rape as an attack on a racial/ethnic group, a previously invisible domain of the human condition was charted. Throughout history, sexual atrocities have been committed within the context of wars, but their (...) weaponisation as acts of genocide remained unarticulated. This changed in the 1990s with Serbia-Yugoslavia’s genocidal wars against its neighbours (Editorial comment: The author uses the term Serbia-Yugoslavia to refer to the entity that succeeded the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence on June 25th, 1991. The SFRY up to that point consisted of the six republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (including the so-called autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina), and Slovenia. Further declarations of independence by Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina on April 27, 1992, left only Serbia and Montenegro who the same day declared themselves to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). In 2003, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which existed until Montenegro and Serbia declared their independence (on June 3rd and June 5th, 2006, respectively)). I sketch the genesis of the concept of sexual atrocities as genocide in connection with my personal journey and how it guided legal prosecution of this “new” crime. My own travel-experience began with my association with Asja Armanda, and her discovery of coordinated mass rapes, when she came to the aid of survivors fleeing the Serbian attacks on Croatia, crimes she attempted to bring to international attention to prevent their expansion into Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Testimonials reached me in the U.S. as well. I went to Croatia to join Armanda, where we named the crime “sexual atrocities as genocide.” On the basis of this new concept, we filed a lawsuit in New York against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, pioneering this crime’s recognition under international law. I conclude with philosophical questions that Putin’s similar genocidal attack on Ukraine raises today. (shrink)

In 2000, the publication of ten texts marked the completion of a two-year project entitled Le Devoir de mémoire, which had brought together ten writers from across Africa to write in response to the Rwandan genocide. This article looks at how the project was posited from the outset as a specifically African response, setting this in the context of older problems of voice, selfrepresentation and the renegotiation of miswritten histories in the postcolonial context. This aspect of the project is (...) made all the more urgent by the actuality of the genocide, and the period of residence the writers spent in Rwanda in 1998. This article argues that the project succeeded in creating a space in which Africa as a whole is made part of the genocide, and vice versa, by raising complex questions of responsibility and by drawing on familiar themes in modern African writing, namely history, memory and identity; exile and dislocation. (shrink)

The dominant approach in genocide studies focuses on the intentions and motives of mass murderers. However, in many cases, natural phenomena, pathogens and machines determine the nature and course of genocidal mobilization. The aim of this article is to present the advantages of the actor-network theory in explaining genocidal mobilization, taking into account environmental factors. “Natural objects” have been selected from a rich catalogue of non-human actors. The author divides these objects into three classes, showing that pathogens and deserts (...) are of key importance in the history of collective violence. Referring to specific cases, the author identifies that adopting the assumptions and methods of ANT reveals new aspects of the genocidal process. This indicates the need for considering the politics of non-human actors, delegating morality and law, tracking consecutive translations, rejecting the division into qualitatively different micro- and macro-actors, and tracking the emergence of new actants and forms of knowledge during genocide. (shrink)

The Failures of Ethics concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite us human beings to inflict incalculable harm. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Our senses of moral and religious authority have been fragmented and weakened by the accumulated ruins of history and the depersonalized advances of civilization that have (...) taken us from a bloody twentieth century into an immensely problematic twenty-first. Salvaging the fragmented condition of ethics, this book shows how respect and honor for those who save lives and resist atrocity, deepened attention to the dead and to death itself, and appeals for human rights and renewed spiritual sensitivity confirm that ethics contains and remains an irreplaceable safeguard against its own failures. (shrink)

Schools are expected to educate children into democratic citizens by providing "civics" or history courses. lt is believed that the formal curriculum affects the amount of cognition of each pupil, which - in its turn - would influence the civic competencies and social attitudes. This supposition is explicitly stated in 'holocaust-education 'programs and in 'civics'-courses. Accordingly, knowledge on the nazi-attrocities would stimulate tolerance, and by this way counter prejudice.The current contribution tests this supposition on survey-data from 773 Frenchspeakin g (...) and 469 Flemish-speaking last-grade pupils from secondary schools in the Brussels-Capital Region. The survey probed for knowledge on the nazi-genocide and attitudescales. The supposition about the connection between knowledge and tollerance, holds partially for the Flemish, but not for the French-speaking sample. Knowledge may be a necessary, but is certainly nota sufficient condition to foster tolerance. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience (...) and the production of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience (...) and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting , like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. (shrink)

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a (...) discrete group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist. (shrink)

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as (...) South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in (...) the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state. (shrink)

This paper, therefore, ploughs the furrow of postcolonial history, memory and the poetic imagination deploying the poetry of the Nigerian poet Joe Ushie.In particular, the paper negotiates the Rwandan genocide as a tragic foreground of the imperial process through its indulgent, artificial fixing of boundaries to accomplish its empire-building project in Africa. But beyond the colonial mediation in, and onslaught on, the cultures of others, the paper argues that African societies have also been complicit in their agonistic and (...) violent history as the Rwandan genocide amply demonstrates. The paper concludes that a martial culture reminiscent of Civan, the warmonger, which manifests itself in private and especially public domains will only entrench intolerance, ethnocentrism, communal wars and violent death on the continent. (shrink)

How is the memory of traumatic events, such as genocide and torture, inscribed within human bodies? In this book, Paul Connerton discusses social and cultural memory by looking at the role of mourning in the production of histories and the reticence of silence across many different cultures. In particular he looks at how memory is conveyed in gesture, bodily posture, speech and the senses – and how bodily memory, in turn, becomes manifested in cultural objects such as tattoos, letters, (...) buildings and public spaces. It is argued that memory is more cultural and collective than it is individual. This book will appeal to researchers and students in anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociology, social psychology and philosophy. (shrink)

This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then analyses how some historians have sought, successfully or not, to overcome this problem.

Oswald Spengler (1880--1936) is best known for The Decline of the West, in which he propounded his pathbreaking philosophy of world history and penetrating diagnosis of the crisis of modernity. This monumental work launched a seminal attack on the idea of progress and supplanted the outmoded Eurocentric understanding of history. His provocative pessimism seems to be confirmed in retrospect by the twentieth-century horrors of economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the emerging global (...) environmental crisis. In Prophet of Decline, John Farrenkopf takes advantage of the historical perspective the end of the millennium provides to reassess this visionary thinker and his challenging ideas on world history and politics and modern civilization. Farrenkopf's assessment ranges widely, placing Spengler's philosophy in its intellectual historical context and covering Spengler's ideas on democracy, capitalism, science and technology, cities, Western art, social change, and human exploitation of the environment. He also illuminates the implications of Spengler's thought for contemplating from a fresh perspective the future of the United States, the leading power of the West. Prophet of Decline is highly relevant today as many take the opportunity at the turn of the century to ponder again the direction in which humankind and our global community are moving and approach with concern the uncertain future amid globalization, hypercomplexity, and accelerating change. An interdisciplinary book about an interdisciplinary thinker, it is a substantial contribution to the literature of historical philosophy, political science, international relations, and German studies. (shrink)

Heydar Aliyev, who did invaluable services in the protection of our historical, national and moral values, has always taken special care of our material and spiritual culture and tried to protect it. The monuments erected in honor of our historical figures, the protection of our historical and cultural monuments and the celebration of the anniversaries of well-known personalities at the international level, the issuance of decrees on deportations and genocides are connected with the name of the great leader Heydar Aliyev. (...) The personality of Heydar Aliyev tried to declare to the whole world that the Azerbaijani people are a people with an ancient culture, both during the Soviet era and during the period of independence. He tried to prove this by preserving the historical and religious monuments that existed in Azerbaijan in the middle ages and passing them on to the next generations. It included medieval sources and our historical figures who lived in this period too. (shrink)

Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustained periods of time as anything other than a (...) choice? Situational explanations offer a type of behavioral account; this is how people act in certain environments. Critical to the situational account as I discuss it is the ‘Asch paradigm’, i.e. experimentally attested conditions for eliciting conformityof behavior regardlesss of available evidence of prior beliefs. In what follows, I defend what I term above a version of situational explanations of perpetrator behavior. Moreover, I maintain that the factors that explain provide an understanding as well. While not committed to the complete irrelevance or exclusion of cultural or structural factors, nonetheless situational analyses can account both for what happened and why. A cardinal virtue of this version of situational explanations consists in showing how shallow the problem of understanding turns out to be for such cases. (shrink)

What can well-meaning people do about terror and genocide? The more we fight against systems of violence, the further we seem to sink into them. This book explores the lives and letters of ordinary and intellectual Germans who faced the ethical challenges of the Third Reich. Trained in history, literary criticism, philosophy, and theology, its four authors look at the role of myths, lies, non-conformity, irony, and modeling in cultivating a self. They explain how we might use these (...) ordinary strategies of selfhood to bear the burden of historical responsibility and be happy doing so.". (shrink)

The associative chain between the personality of Joseph Stalin and his role in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 remains stable among the historical consciousness of Russians from the end of the war until now. Traditionally, high schools devote a large amount of time to study the history of the war, including a range of the events dedicated to remembering the war. As a result, a stable and positive attitude toward the war and its significance to the Russian nation (...) has been achieved, while the attitude toward Stalin remains ambivalent, ranging from assessing him as a perpetrator, who initiated genocide and terror against Soviet people, to national hero and great ruler, who led the country to victory. In 2017, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation introduced three new national history textbooks based on the single goal of teaching Russian history in schools, but in practice has actually returned history back to a uniform standardized historical education across the country, similar to the Soviet education system. In this regard, the historical comparative research based on content analysis of Soviet, Russian, and newly issued textbooks is deemed topical and aimed to track the evolution of the image of Stalin and to understand how the historical representation of Stalin and his war policy has changed over the last 70 years in school education. There is also the goal of identifying the main reasons for the diverse attitudes toward Stalin currently inherent in different generations and rooted in stable ambivalent assessments of his war policy among Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society. (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic belief (...) in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. (shrink)