Suchergebnisse

Review of Jennifer M. Dixon, Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 258, hardcover, $55 US. The question raised by Dark Pasts is how countries, that have committed either genocide or other mass atrocities, respond to international pressure to acknowledge and take responsibility for such a past? The author's thesis is that international pressures and domestic considerations both play a role in how a country accounts for and deals with its past transgressions. A detailed comparison of the responses of Turkey and Japan is the focus of the book, offering important information about the two countries' responses over a 60-year period.

How does one commemorate a genocide that has been denied for a hundred years, and continues to be officially denied by the government of Turkey? The Republic of Armenia, and the foreign ministry in particular, chose to organize a Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide in Yerevan on 22–23 April 2015. It involved several panels featuring the most prominent genocide scholars and included an in-depth discussion of denial. This exchange raised some interesting questions. Are we talking about new forms of denial or new tactics to advance denial? And if, as I argue, all modern regimes deny genocide, then where does that leave us: is genocide denial multiplying?

One hundred years ago, the Ottoman regime, best known as that of the Young Turks, began a series of actions that led to the genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks that only ended in 1923. The articles presented in this special issue of Genocide Studies International deal with the competing interpretations of why the Armenian Genocide occurred, with what the German archives reveal about it and any German responsibility for it, and with Turkish denial since the 1960s. They also make major contributions to understanding the lesser-known Ottoman genocides, those against the Assyrians and the Greeks. There are also questions raised about the concept of genocide and its relation to ethnic cleansing, massacres, deportation, and war. Overall, there is the theme of the complexity of genocide: modes, techniques, and motives. Careful consideration of the Ottoman genocides deepens our understanding of what genocide is and how it can be enacted. What must be averted is letting its complexity become a cover for denial.

April 24 is the day that the Armenian genocide is commemorated worldwide. It is now recognized as the first major genocide of the twentieth century. Often said that was also the first modern genocide in the sense that the omnipotence of the State, in a mixture of fury and calculation, has been serving the destruction of part of its own population. Experts speak of interior and exterior genocide genocide. Both can coexist course, as in the case of the Armenians, present both in Turkey and in the territory of the present Republic of Armenia, which was at that time part of the Russian Empire. But the Young Turk government that triggered the massacre of Armenians has never recognized the genocide and his successors continued to deny its reality for a century. Adapted from the source document.

In the ancient world, the destruction of a people was acknowledged, even celebrated; in the modern world, it has been uniformly denied. This essay is an attempt to indicate the meaning of denial, its relationship to other processes that are similar yet different (non-recognition, erosion of memory, indifference), the logic behind it (denial of the facts, responsibility, applicability of the term genocide to events, the significance of the destruction), the tactics used to further it, and its consequences—especially the various ways in which it undermines efforts to prevent genocide.