Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the (...) role of institutions and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. (shrink)

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 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 (...) 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)

This article discusses how pre-Genocide foreign missionary activity prepared the way for relief and existential support during and after the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1921. Examples are drawn from American, British, and German Protestant missionary organisations, especially the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Turkish Missions Aid Society or Bible Lands Missions Aid Society, and the Christlicher Hilfsbund im Orient. These agencies developed missionary and relief methods and transnational networks which were utilised by the Action Chrétienne (...) en Orient and other twentieth-century mission agencies in their work among Armenian communities. (shrink)

This article discusses how John Dewey's “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” and some of Dewey's related travel narratives reflect “civilizing mission” imperatives and involve multiple utopian operations that have not yet attracted political-philosophical attention. Such critical attention would reveal Dewey's misjudgments concerning issues of diversity, geopolitics, and global justice. Based on an ethicopolitical reading of the relevant sources, the aim here is to expose developmentalist and colonial vestiges, to raise searching questions, and to obtain a heightened view on the (...) stakes of Dewey's utopianism and progressive pragmatism. The article concludes that the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide constitutes a major challenge to Dewey scholarship. (shrink)

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on (...) Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (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)

Considering the value of archives for dealing with the past processes, especially for the establishment of collective memory and identity, this paper discusses the role of archives in situations of conflicting memories such as in the case of the official Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. A crucial problem of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation are the divergent perceptions of what to consider as proper ‘evidence’, i.e. as objective, reliable, impartial or trustworthy sources of knowledge in order to prove the (...) Armenian genocide. The aim of this paper is to show how in a general atmosphere of distrust or prejudiced credibility judgments, even technically reliable archival records will be perceived as unreliable and biased, lacking any evidentiary status to factually prove a genocide which is categorically denied. Therefore, this working paper discusses how claims to reliability, objectivity and other similar scientifically and epistemically relevant attributes are understood in archival science as well as memory studies, and emphasizes the problems related to their instrumentalization by political actors within the context of genocide denialism. The Turkish-Armenian context promises many important empirical as well as theoretical insights on the uses and misuses of these attributes, suggesting that measures ought to be taken beforehand to decrease intergroup prejudice and distrust toward the ‘other’, so that archives can be effective in the truth-finding process. (shrink)

This article offers an argument of genocide denial as an injustice perpetrated not only against direct victims and survivors of genocide, but also against future members of the victim group. In particular, I argue that in cases of persistent and systematic denial, i.e. denialism, it perpetrates an epistemic injustice against them: testimonial oppression. First, I offer an account of testimonial oppression and introduce Kristie Dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering as one form of testimonial oppression, a mechanism of coerced (...) silencing particularly pertinent to genocide denialism. Secondly, I turn to the epistemology of genocide denialism and, using the example of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, show how it presents what Linda Martín Alcoff calls a substantive practice of ignorance. Thirdly, I apply these considerations to individual practices of genocide denial and analyse the particular characteristics of testimony on genocide, the speaker vulnerabilities involved and the conditions under which hearers will reliably fail to meet the dependencies of a speaker testifying to genocide. Finally, I explore the harms that testimonial oppression perpetrates on members of the victim group, insofar as it systematically deprives them of epistemic recognition. (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,.

Abstract: The optimum definition of the term "genocide" has been hotly contested almost since the term was coined. Definitional boundaries determine which acts are covered and excluded and thus to a great extent which cases will benefit from international attention, intervention, prosecution, and reparation. The extensive legal, political, and scholarly discussions prior to this article have typically (1) assumed "genocide" to be a fixed social object and attempted to define it as precisely as possible or (2) assumed the (...) need for a fixed convention and sought to stipulate the range of events that should be denoted by the term. Even if its meaning is a matter of convention, however, "genocide" is not a fixed object but varies by context and evolves in methods and forms over time. In fact, as relevant laws, legal interpretations, and political commitments develop, so do would-be perpetrators modify what genocide is in order to avoid political and legal consequences. This article advances an approach to a definition of "genocide" that allows even legal definitions to keep pace with this evolutionary process. (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)

This paper examines the design and teaching of "Genocide and Human Rights," an innovative, higher education course introduced in 2002 to provide training for a new generation of scholars and teachers. The course was developed and funded by a small non-profit organization, the Zoryan Institute, in Toronto, Canada. One purpose of the course is to teach about the Armenian genocide within a comparative genocide and human rights framework. Another goal is to fill a gap in the (...) curriculum in response to increased student interest and research in genocide and human rights. The course serves as a valuable pedagogical model including its comparative framework, teaching by invited specialists, adjusting the curriculum to reflect student interest and new scholarship, and setting up and maintaining formal and informal scholarly networks. Features of critical pedagogy include classroom dialogue and critique and respect for differences in background and opinion. For example, interactions between students of Turkish and Armenian background provide an opportunity to explore issues of stereotypes, memory, denial and reconciliation. The course provides training for a new generation in research, publications, teaching and advocacy in fields related to genocide and human rights. (shrink)

The category of « postmemory » has been invoked by Marianne Hirsch to refer to a traumatic past which is not directly remembered in first person, but is handed down to later generations and is recalled through the mediation of narratives and images which become “prostheses” for a lack of direct memory. But how is it that these prosthetic recollections do not simply substitute for what lacks but seem to shape the very events they are meant to reproduce ? How (...) come an event continues to haunt the memories of the present, even when no immediate remembrance of it is left ? How to think of an “afterimage” of something that was never seen in the first place? It is only quite recently that the role of prosthetic images has been more widely acknowledged in the construction and creation of memories of collective trauma. The paper will focus on the role of photographic images played in remembrance of the Armenian genocide. It shall be shown how the few pictures that were taken by witnesses of the deportations had an afterlife of their own, being reframed and receiving specific interpretations. In particular, the paper will discuss the case of Armin T. Wegner, a German voluntary serving as Sanitary Officer in the Turkish army who, during his fieldwork in 1915/16 in Anatolia and on the Euphrates in Syria, documented the final stages of deportation, taking pictures of the camps at the desert’s fringes. His photos, which are among the most important visual testimonies of the extermination, only belatedly later made Wegner aware of what he had been witnessing, turning him into a witness après coup and to a defender of the Armenian cause. (shrink)

Russia took the advantage of the contribution of the Armenian armed organizations in order to possess Istanbul, straits around it, Eastern Anatolia, to weaken Turkey, to be strengthen in the Southern Caucasus, organized the rebellion of the Armenians living in Turkey against the government. Russian ruling circles put forward the Armenian matter in order to take advantage of them. Armenians involved in the war to create their own government by obtaining the territory including Van, Bitlis, Tigranakert, Erzurum, Kharberd (...) and Sebastya, as well as Cilicia from Turkey, to solve their Armenian problem. But in fact, Russia, France and England tried to blow to Turkey pretending to try for building an independent Armenian government. The grade of contribution of Armenian military units in the First World War can be characterized as following: 1. Creating the Armenian volunteer units. 2. Establishing the regular battalions and infantry regiments and forming the national corpuses. The organizations of Hnchak and Dashnaksutyun actively participated in creating the Armenian volunteer units. Dashnaks mobilized 40 000 people to destroy the Turkish people. They established tens of khumbas. The Armenian volunteer units were commanded by Andranic Ozanyan, Dro, Amazasp, Keri, Checho, Vardan and others terrorists. Armenian volunteer units which were supposed to move in 4 directions, should act in the directions where the Armenian people were densely populated. These 4 Armenian volunteer units fight against Turks in all important combat operations from Sarigamish to Erzurum. The same time Russian army and Armenians triggered the rebellion of the local population against the Turkish government. 50000 of Armenians were fighting in French, England and USA armies. The Eastern legion of Armenians was established in French army on November 1916. On November 15, 1918, the Eastern Legion was named Armenian legion. The number of the Armenians in the legion riched to 4000. In the beginning of 1916, there was an announcement about subordination of the military detachments to army and establishment of infantry regiments based on that. Establishment of the separate Armenian corpus started at the end of December 1917. In 1917, 8 Armenian shooter regiments were established. From the mentioned 8 regiments two Armenian shooter divisions, the special Armenian division of Andranic, 3 infantry brigades of western Armenians in the Southern Caucasus region, some guerrilla troops in Erevan, Igdir guerrilla infantry and rider regiments, Zeytun regiment in Tbilisi were established. At present, Armenia often raises false claims such as the "Armenian genocide" in the parliaments of the world, trying to confirm this lie. This research proves that Armenians betrayed the Ottoman state during the First World War and also committed Turkish genocides. (shrink)

This article analyzes the claim that “deliberate denial [of genocide] is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right.” Its objective is to demonstrate that the claim is substantially correct: there are instances of genocide negation that are genocidal acts. The article suggests that one such instance is contained in a letter sent to Professor Robert Jay Lifton by Turkey's ambassador to the United States. The article is (...) divided into three parts. In the first part, it delineates and discusses the unexpected contents of the letter to Lifton. In the second, it primarily deals with three topics: lying, genocide, and Austinian performatives. In the third part, it takes the points made in the second part and applies them to the contents of the letter to Lifton, and demonstrates that the letter is an instance of genocide negation that is genocidal. (shrink)

Many German historians are surprised to see how much attention the long neglected Armenian genocide has received in the news since 2015. A plethora of articles and public events was accompanied by attempts of no less than three of four constitutional bodies—the German government, the parliament, and the president—to come to grips with the question of how to understand the German role in the killing of far more than a million Armenians. Whereas Germany’s President Gauck spoke of ‘ (...) class='Hi'>genocide’ in April 2015 and said that Germany must acknowledge its own guilt, the government routinely avoids this word and prefers to characterise Germany’s role as shameful, but not necessarily wrongful. I use this rather complex texture of official positions as an opportunity to raise some questions concerning official avowals of collective shame and guilt by political bodies. (shrink)

The present paper aims to investigate the causes of genocidal mobilization associated with the involvement of ordinary people. I discuss the “innocent causes” of criminal choices made by perpetrators who are not leaders, sadists or radicals. To this end, I compared three total genocides, of Armenians, Jews, Romani, Tutsi and Twa, and selected partial genocides. My analysis proves that entire nations or ethnic groups may be exterminated because many people make criminal choices which are motivated by values and norms that (...) in other circumstances would be considered acceptable or even commendable. These choices are made partly due to the structural pressure of circumstances and are partly derived from dispositions shaped in the course of primary and secondary socialization. Yet, they always require the reflexive mediation of “objective” social forces. (shrink)

This article argues for the claim that we are morally responsible (in the qualified sense proposed in the article) for the crimes of our ancestors if our ancestors, as a collectivity, were part of a community for whose sake and in whose name crimes were committed that meet the definition of the crime of genocide. This claim of ‘‘vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility’’ is supported by two arguments. The first counters the claim that one cannot have responsibilities for events in (...) the past by arguing that this claim oversimplifies one’s relationship to one’s past and the collectivities in which people live. Such collectivities, both ethnic and religious, have identities across time; identification with these collectivities involves accepting certain moral obligations. The second argument is based on the following premise: the political, social, cultural, and educational institutions that mark all large collectivities, such as nations, provide a degree of moral reliability that is necessary for individuals to carry out their legitimate interests. We count on such institutions to exemplify the values that allow individuals to flourish in their life activities. These institutions are by their very nature intergenerational. The moral reliability of such institutions thus requires that we endeavor to acknowledge and repair the damage caused by the failure of these institutions in the past. Accordingly, their health engenders a moral obligation on our part. Vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility is a responsibility not to the past per se but to the past as it plays an active role in the present. (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 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)

Compensation and reparation are two parts or forms of compensatory or corrective justice. This essay aims, first, to distinguish, define, and analyze these two forms as against distributive and penal justice; and, second, to provide a moral justification of a system or social practice of compensation and of reparation, drawing on the ideas of Aristotle, William Blackstone, Bernard Boxill, John Rawls, and James Sterba. Then, by applying the results of the analysis to the first genocide of the twentieth century, (...) the Armenian genocide, it illustrates certain difficulties in realizing reparative justice when the wrongful injury is perpetrated by a sovereign state, and it emphasizes the paramount importance in such cases of the acknowledgment of wrong by the perpetrator. (shrink)

Genocide is a matter of law. It is also a matter of history. Engaging some of the most disturbing responses to the Armenian genocide, Marc Nichanian strikingly reveals the complex role played by law and history in making this and other genocides endure as contentious events. Nichanian's book argues that both law and history fail to contend with the very nature of events for which there is no archive (no documents, no witnesses). Both history and law fail (...) to address the modern reality that events can be—and are now being—perpetrated that _depend_ upon the destruction of the archive, turning monstrous deeds into nonevents. Genocide, this book makes us see, is in one sense the _destruction_ of the archive. It relies on the historiographic perversion. (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)

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)

Genocide is a matter of law. It is also a matter of history. Engaging some of the most disturbing responses to the Armenian genocide, Marc Nichanian strikingly reveals the complex role played by law and history in making this and other genocides endure as contentious events. Nichanian's book argues that both law and history fail to contend with the very nature of events for which there is no archive. Both history and law fail to address the modern (...) reality that events can be—and are now being—perpetrated that _depend_ upon the destruction of the archive, turning monstrous deeds into nonevents. Genocide, this book makes us see, is in one sense the _destruction_ of the archive. It relies on the historiographic perversion. (shrink)

In this paper I start with Adorno’s famous and provocative statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, aimed at asking whether art was still possible in the age of genocides. Then, I take into examination Adorno’s concept of commitment in art – which is closely related to these questions - and the meaning itself of the notion of “Auschwitz” in Adorno’s philosophy. Analyzing what Adorno called “true” art (i.e. art provided with a relevant “truth content”) leads to take into (...) consideration what he understood vice-versa as false or untrue art, in particular mass culture and popular music. Adorno would have probably considered as a sort of blasphemy or heresy the idea itself to write and perform pop-rock songs about such subjects as genocide, but I argue that his views rely on some prejudices that negatively condition his philosophy of art and especially of music. The songs on the Armenian genocide written and performed by the heavy metal band System of a Down serve here as a profitable example that may be of help to foster a critical rethinking of some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

The Armenian world was shattered by the 1915 genocide. Not only were thousands of lives lost but families were displaced and the narrative threads that connected them to their own past and homelands were forever severed. Many have been left with only fragments of their family histories: a story of survival passed on by a grandparent who made it through the cataclysm or, if lucky, an old photograph of a distant, silent, ancestor. By contrast the Dildilian family chose (...) to speak. Two generations gave voice to their experience in lengthy written memoirs, in diaries and letters, and most unusually in photographs and drawings. Their descendant Armen T. Marsoobian uses all these resources to tell their story and, in doing so, brings to life the pivotal and often violent moments in Armenian and Ottoman history from the massacres of the late nineteenth century to the final expulsions in the 1920s during the Turkish War of Independence. Unlike most Armenians, the Dildilians were allowed to convert to Islam and stayed behind while their friends, colleagues and other family members perished in the death marches of 1915-1916.Their remarkable story is one of survival against the overwhelming odds and survival in the face of peril. (shrink)

Law’s claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and especially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durées of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. (...) While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are internal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Perinçek v Switzerland, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Perinçek case concerned Switzerland’s criminalisation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after producing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of ‘history’ and ‘historians’ in these two judgments, and paying attention to the deferrals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law’s relation to history. This close reading offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law’s understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-à-vis the task of historiography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial. (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)

The Philosophy of Forgiveness, Volume IV: Christian Perspectives on Forgiveness is a collection of essays that explores different Christian views on forgiveness. Each essay takes up a different topic, such as the nature of divine forgiveness, the basis for forgiving our enemies, and the limits of forgiveness. In some chapters, the views of different philosophers and theologians are explored, figures such as St. John Climacus, Bonaventure, and Nietzsche. In other chapters, the concept of forgiveness is analyzed in light of historical (...) events, such as the Nickel Mines shooting, the Charleston shooting, and the Armenian genocide. The contributors to the volume come from different backgrounds, including philosophy, theology, and psychology. The essays are written for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and theology, as well as graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students. (shrink)

This essay suggests that Continental Studies of Evil need a more global approach in thinking about political evils of today. Highlighting the need for a more comparative and global perspective, I explore two proposals: first, the in-between space of the geographical binaries of East/West and Global South/Global North cultivates many political evils. Second, taking issue with the conviction in Continental philosophy that the Holocaust caused a rupture in the thinking of evil, I argue for the continuity of evils and characterize (...) the insistence on the unprecedented character of the Holocaust as an example of Eurocentrism. (shrink)

Follow the leader: why people go against their better judgment? -- How could they do that?: understanding the many sources and faces of evil -- Silently standing by: why we do or don't come to the aid of those who need us -- Paving the way to resistance: the gift of good during the Nazi occupation 1939-1945 -- Preconditions of resistance during the Armenian and Rwandan genocides -- Nature of goodness -- The world of heroes: why we need heroes (...) -- Conclusion. (shrink)

Tolerance is an ambivalent attitude. It allows living in plurality but not in equality. The tolerant tradition of the Ottoman Empire, for example, is based on a very clear political and social hierarchy between different religions. Dominants boast of their tolerant tradition. Tolerance is also about imposing limits on the other in a unilateral way. In Republican Turkey where theoretically all citizens are equal, the majority of Turkish-speaking Sunnis tolerate non-Muslim minorities, Alevis, Kurds. It is the ‘liberal’ currents of this (...) ethno-religious majority that pronounce themselves tolerant of others. However, minorities do not demand tolerance but equality because the history of Turkey for more than a century with the genocide of Armenians, pogroms, massacres, deportations have shown those who say they are tolerant can switch to each moment in extreme violence against those whom they now consider intolerable. In this framework, the discourse of tolerance prepares the ground for the reproduction of the... (shrink)

Paul Berron was a singular missionary, a missionary ‘in between’ cultures and nations. He lived and worked not only between his European roots and the field of mission he organised in Syria and Lebanon, but also between two European countries, France and Germany, then involved in a harsh conflict. His experience as an Alsatian and his Christian commitment enabled him to sympathise with the fate of the Armenian survivors of the genocide of 1915. He maintained close links with (...) Christians in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other nations, involving them in the work of the emerging Action Chrétienne en Orient. To him, mission was not only a work in distant countries, but began at home, especially among newcomers to Europe. In his writings he reflected on nationalism, culture, providence and the church, developing a unique and early expression of ecumenical missiology. (shrink)

This chapter examines the role played by derogatory terms (e.g., ‘inyenzi’ or cockroach, ‘inzoka’ or snake) in laying the social groundwork for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide was preceded by an increase in the use of anti-Tutsi derogatory terms among the Hutu. As these linguistic practices evolved, the terms became more openly and directly aimed at Tutsi. Then, during the 100 days of the genocide, derogatory terms and coded euphemisms were used (...) to direct killers to their victims. Understanding these speech acts helps to illuminate the important ways that power is enacted through discourse, how speech acts can prepare the way for physical and material acts, and how speech generates permissions for actions hitherto uncountenanced. Studying the role of speech acts and linguistic practices in laying the groundwork of the genocide illuminates how patterns of speech acts become linguistic practices that constitute permissibility conditions for non-linguistic behaviors. Further, the analysis presented here helps to make sense of the view that a steady, deep, and widespread derogation of a group can be part and parcel of genocide, not only an antecedent to it. (shrink)

L’auteur s’interroge sur la transmission du traumatisme chez les descendants des survivants de génocide. Il insiste sur le gel des affects, l’adhésivité dans la concrétude à des traces du passé. Des pseudo-identifications agies peuvent être comprises grâce au travail dans le contre-transfert.

Genocide is evil or nothing could be. It raises a host of questions about humanity, rights, justice, and reality, which are key areas of concern for philosophy. Strangely, however, philosophers have tended to ignore genocide. Even more problematic, philosophy and philosophers bear more responsibility for genocide than they have usually admitted. In Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, an international group of twenty-five contemporary philosophers work to correct those deficiencies by showing how philosophy can and (...) should repsond to genocide, particularly in ways that defend human rights. (shrink)