The Holocaust and the Logic of Erasure From Auschwitz to Dersim, Roboski, Qarna, Qalatan, Halabja, and Qamishlo

From Auschwitz to Dersim, Roboski, Qarna, Qalatan, Halabja, and Qamishlo
Condemning the “Logic of Erasure” and the Necessity of a Politics of Memory for Occupied Kurdistan

By: Ashtyako Poorkarim

27 January is not merely a date on the calendar; it is an ethical criterion and a political test. A day on which the world remembers how, in the heart of Europe, hatred became law, discrimination took on an administrative face, and the “erasure of human beings” turned into an organized project—one that resulted in the massacre of approximately six million Jews, while millions of other human beings were also victimized because of identity, belief, or “difference.” The Holocaust is not only a historical catastrophe; it is a permanent warning to the conscience of humanity: if societies remain silent in the face of hatred, discrimination, and fascism, history can repeat itself—under new guises, with new names, and with new victims.

But 27 January is also a second mirror for the Kurdish nation—especially under the condition of Occupied Kurdistan: a mirror that shows how “silence” helps crimes continue, and how “statelessness” makes the documentation of suffering difficult. In my view, Holocaust remembrance is both a tribute to the victims and an opportunity to re-read a political truth: major crimes usually begin with small steps; with the normalization of hate speech, with labeling, with constructing the “us/them” binary, with securitizing an identity, with exclusion from schools, media, and administration, and then with the expansion of violence—in the shadow of the world’s inaction.

1. The Ethics of Remembrance: Why Condemning the Holocaust Is a Political Duty

Condemning the Holocaust is not merely a humanitarian stance; it is a modern political position. Any movement or nation that claims justice, freedom, and human dignity must clarify its relationship to the Holocaust—not as “someone else’s issue,” but as the red line of history. Denying or trivializing the Holocaust is not only a distortion of history; it is the production of impunity. And impunity is a green light for repetition.

For this reason, silence on the anniversary of the Holocaust—especially from forces that themselves are victims of policies of erasure—constitutes a serious weakness in political ethics. If we expect solidarity from the world, we must not remain neutral before the greatest global symbol of “memory against hatred.” Silence is not the conservatism of yesterday; it is the backwardness of today. The new generation has the right to demand a new politics: a politics that is not ashamed of empathy, does not fear truth, and does not choose neutrality in the face of fascism—wherever and in whatever form it appears.

2. Mahabad and the Lesson of Pluralism: An Ethical Narrative from the Kurdish Republic

Alongside this global remembrance, there is also a historical image that carries symbolic importance for Kurdistan: in the narratives concerning the Kurdish Republic in Mahabad, it is said that in that brief experience of state-seeking, opportunities were provided for the Jewish community of the region to preserve their language and culture—including education in Hebrew for Jewish children. I highlight this not as a “historical detail,” but as a “political question”: how was it possible, in an era when the world was burning in the fire of hatred, to think in Mahabad about “recognizing the Other”?

At the same time, in those same decades, at the regional level, some governments—within frameworks of political and economic balancing—moved toward closeness and significant cooperation with Hitler’s Germany. This is not about slogans; the point is that history has repeatedly shown that “power” does not always move alongside “ethics.” In such a world, every sign of diversity, coexistence, and respect for multiple identities in Kurdistan is an ethical capital that must be re-read today and translated into the language of contemporary politics.

If we want the world to see crimes against the Kurds, we must show that we also see crimes against others. Global politics means moving beyond the narrowness of “local calculations” and entering the logic of principles: principles against hatred, against racism, against fascism, and against every project of erasure.

3. Conceptual Framework: What Is the “Logic of Erasure,” and Why Must It Be Taken Seriously?

To connect the Holocaust to the Kurdish experience, we must move beyond pure emotion and approach the language of analysis. What is comparable is not “numbers,” but “logic.” The logic of erasure usually rests on several pillars:

1. Dehumanization: turning a group into a “threat,” an “alien,” a “microbe,” a “traitor,” or an “obstacle to development.”
2. Legalizing discrimination: removing citizenship rights, restricting language and culture, denying access to education and media, and building a discriminatory administrative apparatus.
3. Securitizing identity: turning a nation into a security file—where language, clothing, names, and history are also defined as “threats.”
4. Organized violence: from repression, prison, exile, and forced displacement to mass killings and the destruction of a lifeworld (village, economy, memory).
5. Denial and impunity: erasing documents, distorting the victim’s narrative, and escaping accountability.

The Holocaust is the extreme and industrial form of this logic; but this logic repeats in other forms, in other geographies as well. And Occupied Kurdistan, over the last century, has repeatedly witnessed the reproduction of this pattern.

4. Occupied Kurdistan: Four Fronts, One Logic

I do not speak of “Kurdistan in Iran/Iraq/Syria/Turkey,” because that language inadvertently naturalizes imposed borders. I speak of Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Kurdistan; of Occupied Kurdistan. Four occupying regimes, with different languages and ideologies, yet united around one objective: governing a nation without recognizing it.

1. a) Eastern Kurdistan: Violence-Centered State-Building and the Continuation of Repression

In the process of power centralization and modern state-building, the repression of the Zagros and Kurdistan as a whole became one of the tools for consolidating authority. Luristan—as part of the historical geography of Eastern Kurdistan and its surroundings—has been recorded in regional memory through narratives of heavy punitive operations, structural violence, and even the use of modern military means to break society. “Bombing” in this memory is not merely a word; it symbolizes the entry of the modern state into the language of violence against Kurdish society and nation: a clear message that the “Iranian occupier” leaves no right of choice for “Occupied Kurdistan.”

After the 1979 revolution, Eastern Kurdistan also became the scene of one of the most severe periods of repression. The decrees and discourses known in public memory as “jihad against Kurdistan” emptied the political space of the possibility of dialogue and legitimized violence. In such a context, massacres such as Qarna and Qalatan—among the bitter killings of civilians—became enduring in Kurdish collective memory; not only because of the number of victims, but because of their political message: the helplessness of a nation before a power apparatus that is not accountable.

1. b) Southern Kurdistan: Anfal and Halabja, a Truth the World Understood Too Late

In Southern Kurdistan, the Ba’ath regime of Iraq showed how “destruction” can be turned into a security policy: organized operations, scorched earth, forced displacement, the destruction of villages, mass graves, and the creation of a devastated geography whose aim was not only military suppression, but the breaking of the pillars of life. Halabja likewise became a global symbol of that era: a name that in contemporary history has become synonymous with chemical weapons against civilians and mass death.

In Southern Kurdistan, the crime was not merely an “incident”; it was a “campaign.” And this characteristic makes the analytical connection to the Holocaust clearer: when violence takes the form of a campaign, it means there is a plan, a structure, and political will behind it. Differences in scale and instruments matter, but the similarity in the “logic of a campaign of erasure” cannot be ignored.

1. c) Western Kurdistan: Rights-Stripping, Demographic Engineering, and Multi-Layered Violence

In Western Kurdistan, erasure did not always begin with bullets; sometimes it began with paper: rights-stripping, denial of citizenship, cultural restrictions, and policies aimed at weakening the historical presence of Kurds. Then the Syrian civil war made violence multi-layered: state repression, the expansion of extremist groups, and proxy wars in which civilians repeatedly became victims of power rivalries. In this context, Kurds faced both legal erasure and field violence: from ISIS and extremist groups to forces that, under various names, targeted “Kurdish identity”; and in recent years as well, with the rise of new actors—including jihadist forces that have gained power in some areas—concerns about the security and future of Kurdish society have intensified.

1. d) Northern Kurdistan: Dersim, Roboski, and the Continuation of the Justice Deadlock

Northern Kurdistan contains names that have become documents in themselves: Dersim as one of the greatest historical wounds; and Roboski as the contemporary symbol of civilian deaths and a dead end of justice. These two names represent two different periods, yet carry one shared message: if truth is not clarified, if responsibility is not accepted, and if justice is postponed, the wound becomes a political identity—keeping society locked in a cycle of distrust and radicalization.

5. What Does “Not Less Than the Holocaust” Mean? Responsible Comparison, Not Competition in Suffering

I know that a sentence many of our people say—that “the crimes of the four occupying regimes in Kurdistan are not less than the Holocaust”—may be sensitive. If this sentence is taken to mean “identical scale and mechanism,” it is inaccurate; because the Holocaust, in terms of the industrial organization of death and the aim of comprehensive annihilation, holds a unique place in modern history. But if this sentence is understood to mean “the depth of suffering for the victim,” “the continuity of violence across generations,” “the breadth of cultural and human erasure,” and “the systematic nature of denial and impunity,” then it becomes an ethical and political demand: that the pain of Kurdistan must not remain on the margins simply because it lacks a formal state and the global tools of narrative-making.

What links us to the Holocaust is not competition in numbers; it is a shared experience of erasure: when language is banned, when names are changed, when history is distorted, when the human being is reduced to a “security problem,” when exile, displacement, and torture become normalized—this is the dangerous track that, if not stopped, leads to catastrophe. The Holocaust warns us that the “track” must be broken from the very beginning—not when it is already too late.

6. The Core Issue: Why Have Crimes Against Kurds Not Been Documented?

The answer is not only “the world’s indifference”; our problem is the “structure of memory.” Nations that have a formal state can build museums, establish national archives, design school curricula, found research institutions, create courts and truth commissions, and translate the victim’s narrative into the language of international law. But the Kurdish nation—because of fragmentation and statelessness—has often been deprived of these institutional tools. The result is clear: crime occurred, but systematic documentation remained incomplete; testimonies are scattered; documents were destroyed; and the victim’s narrative is often buried under the narrative of the occupying states.

So the issue is not only “remembering”; it is “institution-building for remembering.” A new politics means turning memory into institutions; turning testimony into evidence; turning mourning into programs; and turning pain into a legal and international language.

7. A New Politics: Memory Diplomacy and the Ethics of Solidarity

If the new generation wants a “radical and fearless” politics, that radicalism must be in truth-telling and institution-building, not in slogans and excitement. I summarize this new politics in several principles:

First principle: Clear condemnation of the Holocaust and hate-mongering
Not as a diplomatic courtesy, but as a declaration of loyalty to human dignity. This stance must clarify that our struggle against occupation and repression must never be contaminated by ethnic or religious hatred.

Second principle: Establishing an independent archive of crimes in Occupied Kurdistan
A transnational and professional structure in which the crimes of the last century in Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Kurdistan are documented: testimonies, photographs, sites, local documents, mass graves, and survivors’ narratives. Without evidence, justice is easily sacrificed to political bargaining.

Third principle: Education and public memory
As long as crime remains only in the mind of the victim, the world will see it as “regional” and “marginal.” Memory must be turned into education: books, films, academic research, exhibitions, and public programs. This is precisely the lesson that the global experience of Holocaust remembrance offers us.

Fourth principle: Ethical solidarity among nations
The Kurdish people and the Jewish people are both familiar with displacement, erasure, and resistance. Solidarity between the two peoples, if grounded in truth and respect, can become a shared language: the language of defending human dignity against projects of hatred. This solidarity is neither a tool of daily politics nor an emotional slogan; it is an ethical capital for globalizing the demand for justice.

8. Conclusion: “Never Again” Only Has Meaning If It Is Universal

The Holocaust tells us: if you normalize hatred, hatred becomes the state. If you legalize discrimination, atrocity becomes administrative. If you remain silent, massacre becomes possible. And Occupied Kurdistan tells us: if crimes are not documented, crimes will be repeated—because no one pays the price.

On the anniversary of the Holocaust, we do not only mourn Jewish victims; we take a stand against the logic of erasure. And when we speak of Kurdistan—of the East, West, South, and North—we are not merely recounting history; we are speaking of a political necessity: the necessity of truth, the necessity of justice, and the necessity of institution-building for memory.

This article is an invitation to abandon conservative silence and move toward a new politics: a politics in which condemning Auschwitz brings us closer to defending Halabja, Qarna, Dersim, Roboski, and all the wounds of Kurdistan—rather than farther away. A politics that understands that “Never Again” is not only a slogan; it is a practical program: the program of standing against hatred, in every time and every land—and of defending human dignity without compromise.