On History and the Present Tense
Oxford, Sunday 6 July 2025
Early this morning, I found a note I had jotted down a few years ago, dated 19 September 2023. Azerbaijan had just launched another violent assault against Armenian civilians living in the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh. ‘Yet even as I write, bombs may be falling still, or falling again: or a temporary lull may have been ordered, o...
This essay operates as both a personal reckoning and a broader critique of how history and language mediate our understanding of violence. The strongest version of its argument lies in its insistence that genocide—and systemic cruelty more broadly—is not merely a past event but a process that begins with small, often unnoticed decisions: the sorting of people, the drawing of borders, the casual dehumanization in everyday language. The author steelmans this by grounding abstract concepts in concr...