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, or a ceasefire may be in effect.’ The line is from Adrienne Rich’s essay on sexual violence and Vietnam, published more than fifty years ago.
The radio is on in the background, and a panel is discussing Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury performances from just a week earlier—Saturday 28 June 2025. Two terms keep repeating throughout the programme: hate crime and genocide.
Genocide. I keep turning the word over. It always seems to arrive too late. By the time it reaches us, by the time it becomes part of our soundwaves, our background ambience, countless lives have already gone. It is a word for what we could not save. And yet its scale leaves us no refuge in ignorance.
Listening to the radio programme, I think of Raimond Gaita’s essay on the Stolen Generations—Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families in Australia—in which he reflects that those who use the word genocide do not do so to provoke; they do so because it names what was done to them and to their families.
What does the word genocide do, I wonder—not only for those who seek justice, but for those of us trying to see in the first place? Is their suffering not real if we do not use that word? Does it become more real to us when it falls within a category defined by international law—named as the ultimate crime, as though the word alone might suffice, even when no action follows? Because it is always too late when we say it. Genocide, by definition, belongs to the past tense—lives already lost, already destroyed.
***
Gitta Sereny once said something I’ve never forgotten. Her words come back to me this morning, as the radio keeps playing in the background. The programme has moved on—from Gaza to border control. The shift feels almost seamless, as if violence, too, could be scheduled between segments.
Then the newsreader’s voice: ‘Pop the boats—a look at new tactics by French police to stop boats crossing the Channel ahead of President Macron’s UK state visit’.
It is a bizarre broadcast—playing both the English and French national anthems, speculating on Macron’s fascination with the British royals. And then, almost as an aside, it mentions the 73 people who died crossing the English Channel in small boats in 2024—death reduced to a passing note between gossip about royals and the sound of a marching band. A grotesque lightness in tone, as if loss itself had been scripted for entertainment.
That was what Gitta Sereny had spoken about in her 2001 Amnesty Lecture here in Oxford. And it frightens me—how little seems to have changed, how little her words mattered. She was a historian, like me.
She warned that in our efforts to keep out so-called “bogus asylum seekers”, we are effectively saying: We would rather you returned to the horrors that await you—whether political persecution or abject poverty—than that you came and lived beside us.
In his introduction to her talk, Jonathan Glover recalled visiting South Africa during apartheid. What stayed with him, he said, was not how people spoke about politics, but how cruelty surfaced in passing. ‘We do a lot of amputations here,’ a woman in a hospital told him, almost casually. Why? ‘It’s the trains. The Whites Only coaches have seats. The Non-Whites Only coaches are overcrowded. People travel on the outside. They fall. They lose limbs.’
Glover paused. ‘It really hit me,’ he said, ‘that I was in a society where one group was effectively saying to another: We’d rather you lost your limbs than sat beside us.’
It begins there. With sorting. With deciding who sits inside and who must cling to the outside. With drawing lines—on train carriages, on borders, on passports.
When I was a child, we lived for a time in a small Bavarian village near the Austrian border. My sister and I attended the local Gymnasium—an excellent school, in fact, the reason my parents had moved there. One day, my father—not my mother, and I should say, not my German mother—was asked to come in and meet the headmaster.
It was not a meeting about our progress. The headmaster explained quite openly that he had simply been curious to meet, as he put it, the Turkish man whose daughters were attending the school. My father told me later that the phrasing was almost polite, almost friendly. But it lingered.
Years afterwards, when we were living in Turkey, he spoke about it again. What would have worn him down, he said, were not open hostilities but the small remarks, the ones that sounded harmless. They would have made him an angry man if he had remained. Turkey was not better, he added—but there he could talk about books without first having to explain how he had learned to read.
The signs are rarely dramatic at first. I have a passport, and you don’t. I move freely through this space—this bathroom, this pond, this country—and you cannot.
Genocide happens when the social fabric—as we come to know it, and through which we come to know each other—has become unstitched. When it is torn.
And I am struggling. Struggling with how easy it is to turn away. With how quickly we move on. With how often language is used not to illuminate, but to obscure.
I think about the word deadline. I use it often. I look it up: a line drawn around a Confederate prison. Cross it, and you’d be shot. Orwell warned us that the passive voice hides the shooter. The concrete melts into the abstract. Violence becomes a euphemism—casualty, a chance occurrence, in the Oxford English Dictionary sense of the word. The unnaming—the making unspeakable—can happen not only through silence, but through abstraction. I keep a list of these words—how they slip from policy into the press, from the press into our conversations, from there into the academy. Words are worlds.
The words we use. The words we don’t. The comfort of euphemism. The way a life is rendered background noise. Radio static.
The radio has already moved on. The previous item is history now.
***
A question keeps returning. It is mine.
What kind of work does history do in shaping how we understand violence—in the form of war, of genocide, of silence? And what kind of historian does that work make of us?
***
Oxford, Tuesday 15 July 2025 (my birthday)
I often tell my students here at Oxford: the only real difference between victim and perpetrator is choice. Language can obscure that difference—but it can also reveal it.
They’re gone now—it’s the long summer vacation—and I’m sitting in a small study room in my college, Pembroke, overlooking the empty lawn. The History Faculty is moving into the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. A move that not just we—some of us within the Faculty—but our students protested against.
In our open letter, we wrote: ‘We write to express our opposition to the University of Oxford’s decision to accept £150 million from Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder and Chairman of Blackstone, to build the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. The Schwarzman Centre will be built with the proceeds of the exploitation and disenfranchisement of vulnerable people across the world.’
Now, five years on, we have packed our boxes and are preparing to move into the new building. Office-less, I write either from our little narrowboat or from my college, alternating between them. Today is a college day—with internet, not radio. The news does not drift in; I have to search for it.
I begin researching our unsuccessful protest and whatever else I can find about Schwarzman.
What I find are a few well-researched essays written (under a pseudonym) by—I recognise the voice immediately—one of our former undergraduate students. They’ve long since left, as most do after three years, unless they stay for a postgraduate degree.
I also find that one of the companies in Schwarzman’s Blackstone portfolio was the defence contractor Cobham, along with Ultra Electronics. Both supply key technologies used in F-35 fighter jets, which are operational in the Israel Defense Forces, now in Gaza. The timing is striking: Oxford accepted the donation just as Cobham was being acquired.
Every frame in history is a site of decision. A moment when a different choice might have been made.
Online, I also stumble over an article titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. Omer Bartov, writing in The Times. Something in that headline gives me pause. How could it not? I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. What does it mean to see it?
Seeing is never innocent. Historians, like witnesses, never see from nowhere; we inherit the perspectives our worlds permit.
The headline also carries the weight of exhaustion—of having seen too much, of knowing what the aftermath looks like, and the realisation that now it’s probably too late. As historians, we are in the terrible business of writing when it is all over.
The historian always speaks in the past tense: after the loss, after the fact, after the failure to prevent.
We are trained to write after the fact.
But every frame in history was once open. Every catastrophe was once a series of smaller decisions—of lines drawn, categories imposed, words chosen. What if the work of history is not only to explain what was, but to recognise the moment before it becomes past tense? To dwell in possibility, as Emily Dickinson once wrote.
I think of an image that I show my students.
From Syria, where I lived in my twenties. It appears in the video work Double Shooting by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué. The piece incorporates YouTube footage from 2011, early in the Syrian revolution: a protester films a soldier aiming his weapon—just before he is shot.
There is a moment—a single frame—when we see the soldier decide. The camera catches his face. He looks straight into the lens. At us. For the briefest second, we are both witness and implicated in the decision to take a life.
It is a verb in the continuous present—aiming, deciding, killing—that cannot be undone.
To take out. That’s a phrase I heard on the radio this morning, just before I left for Pembroke. Tossed around like hate crime or genocide—dropped into headlines and panel shows as if a life could be cleanly erased, like a smudge on paper.
No human life deserves to be wasted. Not even in the news.
The Palestinian poet Samīḥ al-Qāsim once wrote, in a poem titled, How I Became an Article: ‘They killed me once and wore my face many times’. The headline endures; the person does not.
***
So I’ve begun to wonder—what would it mean to write differently? Nonviolently? How do we bind up the wounds of war? How do we describe violence not with abstraction, but with attention? Meet brutality with tenderness? Not by building monuments, either in stone or in words—who still wants war monuments?—but by finding a language that shelters. That listens. That cares. That shows the otherwise, again and again.
***
Oxford, Sunday 28 July 2025
I think about that moment often. About the instant in which something has not yet happened, but could. About what Ariella Azoulay calls the potential not-to-do—the moment when an action has not yet hardened into history, when the thread has not yet been spun.
I remember a weaving course I took a couple of weeks ago in Devon—an early birthday present to myself. Every loose thread mattered. I spent hours threading and unthreading the loom until the tension was right. One missed strand and the pattern warped; the whole fabric had to be undone and started over. Repair was slow. Attention was everything.
Nothing could be hurried without damage.
Starting over—or recovery—is not failure, but care. History, I have come to believe, asks maybe something similar of us.
We were trained to describe what happened, not what might still have been otherwise. Distance was our method. The past tense, our safety. But history does not begin in the past tense. It begins earlier, in hesitation, in attention, in the fragile interval before a decision closes. My oldest friend Anne, who runs a gender and diversity consultancy in Munich, once said to me: ‘You are not responsible for your first thought—but you are responsible for your first reaction, and your first action’.
I hear that now as a description of time—not the long span of history, but a narrow one: the space between seeing and doing. Machines can gather facts faster than we can. They can organise and summarise. But they cannot hesitate before a human decision. They cannot occupy the moment in which something could still be otherwise.
History matters here. Not because it delivers final judgements, but because it trains a particular kind of attention—one that resists the ease with which a life becomes a headline, a category, a past event.
Genocide is a word we use after the fact, a name given when the decision is already over.
But the work of history begins earlier. It begins in the present tense.
This essay is published in acknowledgement of two dates: 24 April 2026, marking the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and 25 April 2026, the public opening of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford.
The UK government does not formally recognise the Armenian Genocide as genocide. Its position on genocide prevention (including its approach to recognition) can be found here.
The kind of history we write within these institutional and political frameworks matters.