A Memory That Denies the Perpetrator Reproduces the Perpetrator

Rastinews — I once heard a joke. The man's nickname is "Duck Ali." One day, walking down the road with a friend, the friend looks up at the sky and says, "The clouds are gathering." At this, Ali suddenly flies into a rage and starts a fight. Bewildered, his friend asks, "What happened? Why are you angry?" Ali answers: "You're trying to provoke me. You called me a duck." His friend has no idea what he means. Ali explains: "If the clouds are gathering, it means it will rain. If it rains, ponds will form. Ducks swim in ponds. You're calling me a duck."

The "Duck Ali" joke told in Turkey illustrates something important about human psychology: people sometimes hear not what is said, but the wound inside them. Even a sentence about clouds can be taken as an insult if it touches a place where someone is sensitive. This happens in collective psychology as much as in individual psychology. Trauma, guilt, suppressed historical events and identity defenses can make people react with excessive defensiveness to certain subjects. In Turkey, this often surfaces when history is discussed. When past persecutions, massacres or great ruptures come up, some people immediately go on the defensive-offensive. The debate rarely proceeds on rational ground; it turns into a defense of identity. This shuts down conversation, discussion and elaboration. Yet the problem does not disappear simply because it goes unspoken. On the contrary, unresolved issues keep reproducing themselves and generating new tensions. A mechanism resembling the psychology of being caught in the act may also be at work here. When past persecutions are discussed, some people perceive it not as a historical assessment but as if they themselves were being caught red-handed. In such cases two basic reactions emerge: flight or aggression. This is why very harsh, aggressive reactions can appear when historical issues are discussed. The defensive reflex can turn into aggression. Another dimension of this debate concerns identity narratives.

Turkish identity has often been built on a portrayal of a person defined only by positive traits: good, heroic, honest, brave, just. Evil, meanwhile, is usually attributed to the outside — to enemies or to "others." Yet no one is good twenty-four hours a day. No one is heroic, honest or well-intentioned at all times. Human beings carry both good and evil within themselves. To be human is to exist with both sides at once. When identity is built solely on a narrative of good, another psychological mechanism appears: instead of accepting the negative sides within themselves, people project them outward. Psychoanalysis calls this projection. A person loads their own aggression, flaws or dark sides onto groups they regard as enemies. This lets them go on seeing themselves as clean and innocent. But this is not merely a theoretical debate; it is a heavy psychological reality sitting at the center of people's lives. For some people in particular, this issue is bound up with their own life

story. For someone whose family lived through historical traumas such as Dersim, the situation can be especially stark. A deep chasm can open up between the family stories told at home and the official history taught at school. On one side a person carries the emotional bond formed with a beloved mother or grandfather; on the other, they encounter a narrative in which that same person is cast as a traitor. This creates a severe rupture in a person's inner world. When such historical wounds go undiscussed or unrecognized, they do not simply stay in the past; they carry on living inside present-day relationships. When grievances go unacknowledged, people are forced into a wounded relationship with society. Unrecognized suffering persists like an open wound within social relations. A paradoxical situation results. While trying to argue that their grandfathers did no wrong, committed no persecution, people can end up in a position of producing persecution themselves. That is, in defending the claim that "our people did no wrong," the suffering of others is denied, belittled or suppressed in the course of that very defense. In this way a discourse that tries to reject past violence can, without realizing it, begin to produce new violence. At this point another dynamic appears: the tradition of the perpetrator.

When violence from the past is denied, or covered over in a defensive manner, that very denial carries the potential to produce new violence. Because every suffering that is denied, every story that is suppressed, resurfaces within social relations. A narrative built for defensive purposes can, over time, start generating more aggression in order to protect itself. This produces a paradoxical cycle: the defense mechanisms developed to deny past persecution end up producing new persecutions. This is not merely a historical problem; it can also become a social culture. A narrative that denies the perpetrator unwittingly reproduces the perpetrator. A story built for defensive purposes gradually turns into a story that produces violence. This is why historical reckoning matters not only for understanding the past, but also for breaking this cycle. For a society can only build a more mature shared life that does not reproduce violence once it can face both the light and the dark sides of its own history.

When Trauma Turns Into Nation-Building

Some traumatic events lived through by societies are not simply set aside as "a thing of the past." They leave their mark for decades, even centuries, in culture, in lore, in heroic narratives. When people say "we," they sometimes unite not around a shared value but around a shared wound. Vamık Volkan's conceptualization (in Blindes Vertrauen [Blind Trust], 2005, Psychosozial-Verlag, p. 39) of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo as a "chosen trauma" for the Serbs shows exactly this: a society does not merely remember a defeat, it turns that defeat into the backbone of its identity. But a more uncomfortable question opens up here: given that there have been other defeats throughout history, why did Kosovo wound so deeply? Why could this trauma be stirred up again in the 20th century through Milošević's political language; why did it leave such a deep mark in the collective conscious and unconscious? I think one of the key points is the "father": the killing of the head, the king, the unifying father figure. This is not merely losing a war; it is being left headless, an authority vacuum, a chaotic environment. In pre-modern societies, groupings were mostly organized around a "head/father/leader" — the head of the clan, the feudal lord, the local ruler — power was personalized rather than institutional. The king or sultan stood at the top, representing power itself. In such an order, the killing of the king meant not just the loss of a leader but the dissolution of the order, the fragmentation of the "we," the collapse of the empire. That is why the trauma was compounded not only by defeat but by the fear of disintegration and annihilation.

When severe traumas are not worked through — when there is no mourning, no accountability, no restorative symbolic order established — the trauma does not end. It is only repressed. And like everything repressed, it resurfaces once the right conditions arise; it finds a channel through which to express itself. What happens is exactly what Freud theorized: the repressed returns.

The German example shows this mechanism in its starkest form. The Nazi era is not just a "past crime." It also returns as an extension of earlier ruptures — especially the defeat in World War I and the humiliation and disintegration it produced. Generations may pass. Today's generations may form no direct link to it. Yet it leaves a trace in society's conscious and unconscious mind. These traces are not mere "memory." They produce automatic defenses against certain triggers: denial, projection, demonization, hypersensitivity, taboo-making. Such traumas revive specific reflexes and defense mechanisms in that society.

Here is what I am trying to say. A similar collective reactivity, rooted in the ruptures of the late Ottoman period and the founding of the Republic, remains unresolved. That unresolved state produces serious symptoms in society. Some traumas do not "stay in the past." Karbala happened centuries ago, yet the mark it left on the souls of Shiites and some Alevis feels as if it happened yesterday. In short, some traumas pass from generation to generation. People react as though they lived through a trauma even when they never did. This is not exaggeration. It is how collective psychology works: a trauma's historical time and its psychic time are not the same. Every November 10, people turn Anıtkabir into a site of pilgrimage and weep as if for the death of their own ancestors. Within this emotional intensity lies a mourning that never ends… This is not a normal state…

State Sensitivities and an Unmourned Past

This is why the "state sensitivities" put forward by authority — the state or religion — are often not innocent. They are usually presented as cultural nuance or historical sensitivity. In reality, they are often zones of immunity around unmourned traumas. Limits such as the state's immunity from criticism, the nation's immunity from debate, and official history's immunity from question are usually framed as a demand for "respect." But what is being demanded here is rarely real respect. Respect is not a feeling produced by force. It is earned, not demanded. Behavior that people show only because they are coerced or pressured is not respect. At best, it is a performance of respect, a display of respect. Real respect results from a relationship that forms between two people over time. It is a feeling that comes from within. This is why demands phrased as commands — "respect my faith," "respect my opinion" — usually turn into a demand for obedience rather than respect.

This is why "state sensitivities" usually function less as moral nuance than as a defense reflex. What is sensitive here is not the state's honor. It is, more often, the past the state cannot face. When people say "the state is being worn down," what is actually being expressed, most of the time, is that something repressed has been triggered. When people say "national unity is being harmed," what is usually meant is that traumatic zones treated as untouchable have been disturbed. This is why the reactions given are so often disproportionate. A single sentence, a question, or a criticism can be perceived as an existential threat. This is probably what "turning into Duck Ali" looks like. Because the issue is not the content of that sentence. The issue is the repressed zone the sentence touches. These repressed zones are not only legal or political. They are also deeply emotional. This is why a demand for criticism, debate, or confrontation can be perceived as a threat not only through its content but even through its tone.

In such situations, the response usually does not come through argument. Instead of debate, accusation, criminalization, and demonization take over. The relationship built with the state here is not rational. It is, most often, traumatic. The state is positioned less as an institution than as a fragile, easily offended "father figure." Any question directed at this father figure can be perceived as an attack. This is why, in Turkey, the state is usually positioned not as an apparatus that serves the citizen but as an entity the citizen must emotionally protect. The roles are reversed. Normally the state protects its citizens. Here, instead, a relationship forms in which the citizen seems obligated to watch over the state. Criticizing the state can be perceived not as a citizen's right but as disloyalty or betrayal. This is often not merely a political choice. It is also the psychic result of unresolved historical ruptures. Every trauma that goes unmourned, whose responsibility goes unclaimed, and that never becomes a narrative, produces zones of immunity over time. These zones of immunity demand not criticism but obedience. This is why "state sensitivities" are usually not a sign of democratic sensibility but a sign that social healing has been suspended. Real healing is only possible with a past that can be spoken about, debated, and confronted. Repressed trauma does not disappear. It only produces immunity. And where there is immunity, what is demanded is not thought but obedience.