Yesterday, May 18th, marks 46 years since the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. To simply explain an event that can’t be explained simply: in the wake of a military coup, students in the South Korean city of Gwangju gathered to demonstrate in support of democracy and an end to martial law. South Korean special forces sent to quell the protests responded with overwhelming and indiscriminate violence. In Gwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, Lee Jai-Eui documented people having been bayoneted; charred by flamethrowers; shot from helicopters; beaten with fists and clubs; and subjected to torture and sexual violence. 

Over the course of approximately 10 days, the people of Gwangju resisted. It’s estimated that some 200,000 people took part in some way, and civilian militias wrested control of the city from the military for a stunning five days of organized self-rule before ultimately being crushed. The exact number of people killed has not been definitively determined, but estimates range from over one hundred to the low thousands. Dozens were classified as missing and have never been found. Thousands more were injured. Further tens of thousands of students, labor leaders, journalists, and other alleged political enemies were imprisoned in the years that followed. 

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Have you ever heard of Jonny Buchardt? His name may sound like box office material, but he never made it big, let alone to Hollywood. And still, there is a good chance you’ll run into him these days, on your phone or laptop, because he has gone massively viral. With a funny thing that happened many years ago, not on the way to the forum in ancient Rome but during Carnival season in 1970s Cologne.

Jonny Buchardt was a German stand-up comedian (a rare species, but they do exist) and looks like a puffed-up version of Ricky Gervais. It wouldn’t surprise me if Jonny turned out to be Ricky’s dad.

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The Stonewall Monument is situated in the heart of Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. The 7-acre site preserves the location of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, a pivotal moment in the LGBT rights movement and American history, when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Bar, a popular gay bar, setting off days of protesting that were violently suppressed by the police. In 2016, President Obama formally declared the area a National Monument. The next year, the site was the first National Monument to fly a rainbow flag. 

Days after taking office for his second term, President Trump issued Executive Order 14168, or Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. Among the consequences of Executive Order 14168, many of the references to LGBT identity were stripped from the Stonewall website. On February 9, 2026, the rainbow flag at Stonewall was also removed, a public and visible testament to the continual erasure of what the Administration has labeled “corrosive ideology.” 

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Last summer, I spent two weeks working with the  Herero community education group Hitambo Virtual Academy, to document oral histories of the 1904 Herero and Nama genocide and supporting teachers interested in genocide education. The trip served as the launching point of a multiyear project between our Center and partners in Namibia and Germany that will culminate in classroom resources for Namibian, German, and American teachers to better teach about the genocide.

For me, it was an opportunity to see firsthand how colonial violence is remembered in Namibia. This was not my first time learning about Germany’s colonial history. In 2022, I spent two weeks in Germany as part of a fellowship understanding cultures of remembrance in Germany and the United States. I reflected on that experience in an article I wrote when I returned, but my main takeaway was the difference in how  Germany memorializes the Holocaust versus the violence committed in its colonial territories. In many ways, this mirrors American approaches to memorialization; often minimizing its own role in perpetuating settler violence, especially in recent years. 

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(This post contains spoilers for Cabaret.)

Following a co-hosted symposium on the Weimar Republic, the Guthrie generously invited the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies to attend a performance of Cabaret. We went last weekend, and it was simply exceptional. If you stop reading here, or take nothing else away from this post, see the show!

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Act I. The play opens. “Wilkommen.” Soft chugging of a train as Cliff arrives in Berlin. 

Act I of Cabaret is everything a real cabaret should be: decadent, sultry, and dazzlingly hedonistic. It is a modernized—and more carnal—version of Lautrec’s famed portraits of gaudy nightlife, but recontextualized through the sort of Brechtian self-awareness made possible by good directing. However, this illusion of the perfect cabaret splinters at the end of the act, when the Emcee recoils in horror as their gramophone begins playing an eerie and increasingly disconcerting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” As an audience, we sense a change; we just don’t know what it is yet. 

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Last week, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies had the honor of hosting a two-day workshop with 25 educators in partnership with Yahad–In Unum, an organization internationally recognized for its work uncovering forgotten sites of mass violence and amplifying survivor voices.

We were thrilled to see so many educators sign up, eager to learn and engage with challenging, timely material. The energy in the room was palpable, from the very beginning, participants asked thoughtful questions, shared insights, and leaned into the difficult but vital work of studying genocide and mass atrocity.

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Ottomania and the Armenian Genocide in World History Curriculum

June 2025

“Do high school students in the United States learn about the Armenian Genocide?” 

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. K-12 education in the United States is highly decentralized and localized, with decisions about what is taught and learned made by districts, schools, or, most often, individual teachers at the classroom level. Some state-level surveys of genocide education have been conducted, but the variability of curricula among schools and the high rate of teacher turnover make it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. While Holocaust education has become a mainstay of American curricula for decades, education about so-called “other genocides,” including the Armenian Genocide, is still much less common.

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Review for UM CHGS

May 6, 2025

As academic interest in settler colonialism has increased, so have innovative studies. In her most recent book, Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries, Jodi Kim (Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth) takes on the topics of military and transpacific history, imperial conquest and neoimperialism, and how US outposts paradoxically reproduce liberation and domination.  Although this, at first glance, seems a lot to consider in one work, Kim’s brilliant study deftly interrogates the development of U.S. military imperialism in the transpacific as inextricable from debt imperialism and the neoliberal world order.

Cover of Jodi Kim’s Settler Garrison. Debt, Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries 

(Duke University Press, 2022)

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A few months ago, I rode to church with an older woman from my congregation. We hardly knew each other, so I told her about the college courses I was taking, and she took an interest in “Sociology of Mass Violence.” After I explained the course and my current project on video games, she sat in silence for a moment. “How do video games relate to genocide?” she asked, expressing her belief that the rising popularity of shooter games makes players more violent. I tell her that violence within video games is more a product of humanity’s cruelty, instead of the other way around. Even the games I play—classified as “cozy games” by the community—display forms of violence that mirror those seen in my Sociology of Mass Violence course. Minecraft specifically utilizes a game mechanic to acquire resources, which has been exploited by the player base. The lack of responsibility for one’s actions against and treatment of the mobs in the game, in tandem with justifications players make for their behaviors, echoes back to concepts James Waller discusses regarding perpetrators. 

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When you grow up in Poland, you know when you know. Poland, a country that has endured centuries of Russian aggression — cultural, military and political. We were partitioned, occupied, Russified, and silenced. Our intellectuals were often imprisoned or executed, our histories rewritten. My family, like many others, lived under the oppressive, dishonest Soviet propaganda.

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