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]
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.
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.