Thinking in Dark Times: The End of Tradition and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies

To understand what such a rupture demands, it may be helpful to recall the crisis faced by European Social Democratic parties in 1914. When World War I broke out, many of these parties chose to support their respective national governments rather than uphold internationalist principles. In response, Lenin accused them of betraying the universal ideals of socialism and aligning with nationalist war efforts. To reclaim the socialist project, he argued, a total break with the old guard was necessary — a radical beginning rooted in a commitment to principle over loyalty. That break led to the foundation of the Communist International.

While the stakes and contexts differ, the underlying logic is not unfamiliar: in moments of profound moral failure, only a clean break can restore the integrity of a tradition. The same challenge now stands before Holocaust and Genocide Studies. A clean break with those who have rationalized the destruction in Gaza is necessary — and that rupture must begin with abandoning the name itself. The time has come to move forward under a new name, one grounded in the principles that the field was originally meant to uphold.

Arendt and the End of Tradition

The crisis we have described extends beyond Holocaust and Genocide Studies. It is not merely an academic failure, but a symptom of something deeper: a civilizational rupture. What it signals is the unraveling of a foundational claim — the breakdown of the very framework modernity constructed to define and legitimize itself. The civilizational claim modernity made about itself was rooted in the Enlightenment — a project that presented itself as a turning point: a moment when humanity would restrain its violent instincts through reason, law, and universal principles. That promise, briefly renewed after 1945, took form in a new moral grammar — an extension of the ethical corpus shaped in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which was seen as a civilizational break. What we are experiencing now is the end of that tradition.

In Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt described this condition as the end of tradition. We are living in a rupture — a historical in-between — where the thread connecting past and future has snapped. Tradition, she argued, once functioned like a banister: a conceptual handrail that provided orientation in moments of darkness. It didn’t offer certainty but gave us a sense of continuity — a thread to hold on to. It allowed us to judge not by delivering certainties, but by maintaining a continuous thread of critical reflection. Like a compass, we could consult to understand what was right and what was wrong. Now, that compass — our banister — is gone, and we are left in free fall — naked, as Arendt puts it, stripped of the treasure of tradition that once gave meaning to judgment and action. It is the existential condition of humans after the collapse of guiding narratives.

For Arendt, the Holocaust marked the factual end of that tradition. It introduced a crime so absolute, so industrial in its execution and metaphysical in its intent, that it could no longer be judged by the categories we inherited — those grounded in Enlightenment humanism and classical notions of justice. The Holocaust shattered the continuity of Occidental history not only through its scale, but by revealing the conceptual inadequacy of the very values we believed would contain violence. With Auschwitz, everything became possible — not as a promise, but as a verdict.

In Gaza, nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been killed — most of them civilians, many of them children. Entire families have been annihilated. Schools, hospitals, places of worship, refugee camps, and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble. The basic conditions of life — shelter, nutrition, health, water — have been methodically targeted and destroyed. Gaza has been turned into a vast ruin, where survival itself has become nearly impossible. Children are dying not only from airstrikes, but from dehydration, starvation, untreated wounds, and preventable disease. What we are witnessing is not only mass killing but the systematic erasure of a society’s capacity to live.

What has been equally shattered is the language we use to speak about that destruction and violence. It is not just Gaza that has been reduced to rubble, but our capacity to describe its devastation with moral clarity. Violence is no longer hidden. It is no longer even regretted. Political figures have not merely tolerated this destruction; they have begun to brag about it. Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly joked about the use of beepers to guide precision bombings. Donald Trump, speaking in 2025, casually proposed turning Gaza into a “Riviera.” These were not slips of the tongue. They were signals — the transformation of mass death into a development project. Ethnic cleansing is rebranded as real estate opportunity. There is no shame in it. Violence has become a branding strategy. We are back in antiquity. Kings once glorified their massacres in stone carvings. Promotional videos now function like the monuments of ancient kings. Today’s leaders project theirs on screens — not as shame, but as spectacle.

All of this points to a deeper collapse: the disintegration of the moral compass that once placed limits on how we speak about violence. The moral grammar of the post-1945 world has failed to account for this horror.

Language of Violence: From Talat–İsmet Pashas to the State Department

And there is more. The horrors in Gaza are no longer denied. On the contrary, they are acknowledged — and justified. “Yes, these things are happening,” we are told, “but it is Hamas’s fault.” A US State Department spokesperson recently declared: “Every single thing that is happening in Gaza is happening because of Hamas… All of this could stop in a moment if Hamas returned all the hostages.” These words carry an unmistakable message: the violence will continue unless certain demands are met.

To publicly explain why it is happening — without hesitation, without even lowering one’s voice — is to admit the crime itself. There is no such thing as a mass atrocity without a cause. Every act of annihilation, without exception, is carried out with a stated reason. And those offering these explanations today seem unaware that they are not denying the crime—they are affirming it. They are telling us why it is being committed, and in doing so, they are not defending themselves; they are confessing — proudly, and without realizing it.

This logic has a long history. It was voiced by Talat Pasha in 1916 and 1918, when he defended the Armenian Genocide at CUP congresses by declaring: “The Armenians have only themselves to blame for what happened.” And it was reiterated seven years later, at the Lausanne Conference in 1923. During his opening remarks, İsmet Pasha shut the door on the Armenian question before it could be opened: “Whatever happened to the Armenians, it happened because of what they did.” That sentence, unchanged in tone, is now echoed in the State Department’s central argument on Gaza. What was once the foundational reflex of Turkish denial now echoes in the diplomatic language of the world’s superpower.

Arendt offers no program for salvation. What she offered was something more dangerous: the imperative to think. To recognize the void left by the collapse of tradition and to resist the temptation to fill it with easy answers, tribal allegiances, or institutional loyalties. That invitation is more urgent now than ever. For when even genocide becomes narratable, justifiable, marketable — when the field that once emerged to prevent such atrocities now flinches at the task of naming them — then we are not just witnessing the collapse of an academic discipline. We are standing in the ruins of the moral world that once gave it meaning.

Striking Parallels: From Turkish to Israeli Denialism

For those of us working on the Armenian Genocide, the discourse around Gaza feels like déjà vu. There is not a single argument offered today by Israel and its defenders that was not already deployed by the Ottoman-Turkish state more than a century ago. We know this language. We have lived inside its rhetorical machinery. We are, in a sense, immune to its logic — because we have heard it all before.

Let’s take the most fundamental argument: the fear of annihilation and the need for self-defense. The core thesis of over a century of Turkish denialism is as follows: Anatolia is the final refuge of Muslim Turks who barely escaped extermination and deportation in Europe and the Caucasus. Now, even in this last homeland, they are surrounded by enemies waiting for the right opportunity to strike. Against these forces, they claim to be engaged in a continuous war for existence. What took place in 1915, according to this narrative, was not genocide, but national defense. As İsmet Pasha would later formulate it at Lausanne, “The Turkish State, having become conscious of its right to preserve its existence, will not hesitate to act as it deems necessary — like any other independent state — against threats directed at its survival.” When the first major critical conference on the Armenian Genocide was held in Istanbul in 2005, protesters stood outside for days, carrying banners that read: “We did not commit genocide; we defended our homeland.”

‘Armenian Terrorists’: Hamas and PKK

A parallel can be seen in the justification for the massacres in Gaza, where the very existence of Hamas is presented as the primary reason for the killings. The crimes committed by a terrorist organization are invoked as the main pretext for Israel’s actions, which are framed as the legitimate exercise of its right to self-defense. Those of us who study the Armenian Genocide recognize this argument immediately. It is a script that has been used before.

According to this narrative, Armenian terrorists had been actively organizing since the 1890s, targeting Muslims in the regions where they operated. Not only did they kill Muslims, but they also intimidated and murdered Armenians who refused to support them. Their ultimate goal, the argument goes, was to dismantle and destroy the Ottoman Empire, and they did not hesitate to cooperate with foreign powers to achieve this end.

During World War I, while the Ottoman state was engaged in what it regarded as an existential war against Russia, Armenian militias are said to have formed irregular bands — chetes — that carried out attacks in areas such as Van, Kars, and Ardahan, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Muslims. These bands, according to the same argument, acted as the vanguard of the advancing Russian army. The events in Van in April 1915 are thus framed as a large-scale uprising, in which Armenians allegedly seized control of the city with Russian support.

Within this framework, what is now referred to as genocide is portrayed as a legitimate war of self-defense. Deaths occurred, but they were not the result of any deliberate plan. The Ottoman government, it is argued, took all possible measures to minimize civilian casualties, and any suffering that did occur was simply an unavoidable consequence of wartime necessity.

This narrative structure was not limited to the Armenian case. It was later replicated in the state’s approach to the Kurdish issue. In this context, the term bandit (chete) gave way to terrorist, and the longstanding political demands of the Kurdish population were reframed as illegitimate acts of subversion. The state’s treatment of the PKK became the dominant lens through which the entire Kurdish population was interpreted. Once again, the language of existential threat came to shape policy. The tools of governance shifted accordingly: mass arrests, cultural restrictions, and military operations were presented as security measures rather than political strategies.

A similar logic now informs dominant narratives around Gaza. The existence of Hamas and the violence it has committed are invoked as the basis for large-scale collective punishment. The underlying assumption is clear: the presence of a militant organization legitimizes systemic repression, and any opposition to this repression is interpreted as further confirmation of the original threat.

Yet the point here is not the nature of these organizations or the extent of their violence. In his 2000 legal defense, the PKK’s leader openly admitted that the group was responsible for more than 15,000 deaths, including civilians and members of rival Kurdish organizations. The author of these lines was forced into hiding for years to avoid being targeted by the PKK. German security authorities even offered a new identity — including facial reconstruction surgery — for protection abroad.

Acknowledging this violence, however, does not resolve the underlying issue. Using these narratives — or personal views about these organizations — to obscure the structural oppression experienced by Palestinians or Kurds is methodologically flawed. Substituting the actions of militant groups for the lived realities of institutional inequality serves to reproduce, rather than explain, repression. More fundamentally, the idea that the dominant group has the authority to dictate the form and legitimacy of resistance by the marginalized is not a principle — it is a form of arrogance. It reflects a posture in which the powerful not only suppress resistance but also lecture the oppressed on how they should resist.

Criminalizing Free Speech

One especially revealing parallel lies in the legal suppression of speech. In Germany and the United States, accusations of antisemitism are increasingly used to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies or to dismiss any reference to the term genocide in relation to Gaza. While this dynamic has not yet been fully codified into law, efforts to push such critiques beyond the bounds of acceptable public discourse are already visible.

I must admit, for those of us in Turkey who have worked on the Armenian Genocide, this situation evokes a wry smile. “Insulting Turkishness” has long been a criminal offense, and public references to the Armenian Genocide have been prosecuted for decades. According to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, calling the genocide by its name has been deemed an attack on national identity. It was this charge that played a key role in the targeting of Hrant Dink, whose assassination in 2007 followed years of legal harassment. The same law was used against numerous others, including the author of these lines. Hrant Dink’s son, Arat Dink, was sentenced to over a year in prison simply for publishing the word genocide.

Following the public outrage sparked by Hrant Dink’s murder, the government was forced to take a step back, amending the law to require special permission from the Ministry of Justice before charges could be filed under Article 301. Yet, this legal provision still hangs like the Sword of Damocles over anyone who speaks about the Armenian Genocide. Given this history, we are hardly surprised to see the US and Germany moving toward criminalizing discussions of Israel’s genocide by labeling it anti-Semitism and excluding it from protected speech.

Among scholars and activists in Turkey, a common refrain has long circulated: before repressive measures are introduced in the West, they are often tested here first. The rise of authoritarian discourse under Trump only reinforced this impression — echoing tactics that many in Turkey had already come to know intimately.

There are striking structural similarities between Israel and Turkey. As noted earlier, one of the most prominent is their shared approach to denying the mass violence they have committed. Both states perceive their existence as being under continuous threat and have developed long-term security doctrines shaped by that perception. A key component of these doctrines is external aggression. It is not coincidental that both Israel and Turkey have pursued expansionist policies and extended their reach beyond their official borders.

Ultimately, we are confronted with two apartheid regimes in the Middle East. The literature on Israel’s apartheid system is extensive and well established. In Turkey, Kurds, Christians, and Jews also do not enjoy full equality under the law. There are no members of these communities serving at the highest levels of the executive, legislative, or judicial branches. A combination of explicit legal barriers and implicit cultural norms ensures that these groups remain excluded. Both Israel and Turkey — functioning respectively as a Jewish state and a Turkish state — adopt comparable methods of marginalizing and disciplining those who fall outside the dominant ethno-religious identity. And when ordinary mechanisms of repression prove insufficient, both have resorted to mass violence.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while shaped by its own historical context, is in its logic a textbook example of the nation-state’s security paranoia, where defense merges with domination — and the destruction of the other. The belief that lasting peace can be achieved only through the permanent elimination of perceived threats is not new. It is simply one iteration in a long historical pattern.

In Place of a Conclusion

What makes this moment historically significant is not Israel’s actions alone, but the response — or lack thereof — within the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Because the field has been shaped in part by its symbolic and institutional proximity to Israel, the events in Gaza have provoked a profound internal crisis. Scholars who once spoke with clarity about other cases now appear hesitant — unable or unwilling to apply the same moral framework when atrocity emerges from within what they perceive as their own ethical community. Prioritizing national allegiance over universal principle, many have slipped — perhaps unwittingly — into what can only be called the banality of denialism.

What we are witnessing, then, is not only a political crisis or a humanitarian catastrophe, but a collapse in moral and intellectual infrastructure. The tradition that once claimed to guide our judgments — rooted in the Enlightenment, anchored by postwar moral grammar, embodied by Holocaust and Genocide Studies — can no longer bear the weight of the present. The banisters Arendt once wrote about are gone, but the need for orientation remains. “Das Licht der Öffentlichkeit verdunkelt alles – the light of the public sphere darkens everything.” Arendt’s metaphor is powerful: a light that does not illuminate, but blinds. It darkens not only truth, but also conscience, and the very values that make us human. What is offered as clarity — by the media, by politicians, by institutions — often serves only to deepen the darkness.

The task ahead is not simply to expose, but to illuminate — to find, or perhaps become, those who will cast light differently. That is the beginning we now require. We live in dark times — and Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as it currently stands, cannot emerge from this moral wreckage by clinging to its inherited name or compromised tradition. It stands not at the end of its road, but — if it dares — at the threshold of a radical new beginning.