Dark Pasts
(publ. Cornell University Press)
Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan (2018) is a book by historian Jennifer Dixon that discusses controversies around Japanese war crimes in World War II and the Armenian genocide denial in Turkey.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] According to Dixon, states tend to deny rather than glorify their past crimes due to international constraints.[9]
References
- S2CID 225373889.
- S2CID 225776763.
- ^ Mouradian, Khatchig (2019). "Mouradian on Dixon, 'Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan'". H-Net. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
Throughout the 2000s (and to this day), the official Turkish narrative has denied outright, and systematically, that the experience of the Armenians was a crime at all, let alone a genocide. Whatever linguistic acrobatics the state narrative has performed does not change this reality.
- S2CID 216385074.
- S2CID 225297846.
- S2CID 202257445.
- S2CID 225409844.
- S2CID 225410314.
- S2CID 225480162.
However, if ardent nationalists and militarists were willing to commit the Armenian Genocide and Nanjing Massacre, why haven't they been willing to admit these atrocities? ... Although focused on the material and ideational reasons why states resist showing contrition, Dark Pasts helps answer why unrepentant nationalists avoid unambiguously justifying dark politics... These patterns of evasion reveal that even far-right Turkish and Japanese nationalists understood that embracing mass atrocity crimes could be politically damaging, a source of shame, and a stain on the nation.
Further reading
- Dixon, Jennifer M. (2018). Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-3025-2.