The relocation or destruction of the monuments of Soviet heroes in our times is in fact a process of replacement of one myth by the other. The commemoration of historical events has become the subject of struggle and manipulation of political power. The Soviet era is today the subject of divergent interpretations, ranging from nostalgia to denial, depending on the cultural, ethnic and socio-economic context in which these memories take place. In this article the processes are analysed, in which Lithuanians and Georgians change the meaning of symbols of their past in the attempt to redefine history and determine the fate of their fallen heroes.

In this article, we try to answer the question of how and why the stories of the victims of attacks by the guerrilla movements in the 1970s in Argentina are currently silenced in the public sphere. We analyse how this collective denial is negotiated in human rights discourse. In particular, we show how strategic and essentialist silences as well as denial (literal, interpretative, implicatory) feature in political debates about human rights and political violence.

After catastrophic events, memorialisation is part of coming to terms with the past and rebuilding the future. It is also part of the social construction of the past – a struggle between conflicting representations of past events by different groups in society, with different memories, interests and degrees of power to influence which version of history is eventually recognized as correct and which is denied. In Western Europe, we tend to study such processes in parts of the world far removed from our own, forgetting that the major genocide of the 20th century, took place in our own cities, and that a process of memorialisation was ongoing there for many years after the war. The Jewish quarter in the centre of Amsterdam has many monuments, buildings and museums connected to the history of the Jews of Amsterdam, the majority of whom died in the death camps of the Shoa. The memory landscape of the Jewish quarter is dynamic, a reflection of a culture of remembrance and denial concerning the Second World War, in which events and people are remembered, but others forgotten. What can the urban landscape of Amsterdam tell us about this culture and its relationship to social and political events during and after the war? What/who are remembered and what/who forgotten, by whom, and why? How has that changed over time?

In the introductory article of this special issue on the language of denial, some relevant concepts in relation to denial, speech act and discourse theory are explored. Stanley Cohen’s distinction between literal, interpretative and implicatory denial is illuminated, as well as the contribution of various scholars on the performative function of language. At the end of the article the relevance of these concepts for (cultural) criminology is explained.

This article explores the relation between death, the fear and denial of it, and the appeal of mortuary rites attempting to transcend senses of mortality. It aims to show how our Own death, as a shamefull and solitary characteristic of modernity, has become a taboo and how it simultaneously continues to spur our imagination of the way Others die. Building on research in Suriname, it argues that both colonial compulsion and anthropological gazing have contributed to distorted and ambiguious attitudes toward death cross-culturally. As such, the article seeks to advance discussions on death and taboo as a perpetuum mobile of dread and everlasting enchantment.

This essay argues that the breaking of taboos is an effective means to increase one’s definition-power and discredit the establishment. But rhetorical warfare and satire may also turn into its opposite: strengthening fanaticism. First, the author discusses the controversy surrounding the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo and the militant pleas for maximum artistic freedom, articulated by Salman Rushdie and others. In the second part of this essay the author argues that advocates of an inviolable right to freedom of expression, including the right to insult, may create their own taboos. Within the tabloid press and the outrage industry this ‘right’ gets more aggressive functions. Finally, some ambiguities about political correctness and the racism-taboo are discussed.

Journalists are accustomed to investigate and interpret current forms of violent conflicts and massacres. Psychologists and social scientists lag behind and seem to focus more on ‘remote’ forms of evil, often focusing on forms of authoritarian behaviour and obedience, especially related to the Holocaust. It is striking that reflections on collective violence are often ignored by criminologists. How can this ‘distance’ be explained? Why is there little incentive to study ‘evil’? In this introduction we first discuss the difficult issue of how to define ‘evil’ and we clarify its various meanings. Then we focus on the Holocaust, an oppressive theme that still instigates much debate. In particular, the thesis of the ‘banality of evil’ is controversial. This interest in appalling forms of mass destruction – by theologians, ethicists and historians – raises once again the question why criminological reflection and research of barbarity remains underdeveloped.

The author points out that tribunals against war criminals are characterized by investigations of the broader military and social developments. By outlining the historical context of the violence the public is in a better position to make informed and balanced judgments. Criminal tribunals have a communicative character and great educational potential; they make clear why the Great Evil cannot be accepted and has to be punished.

By introducing the historical concept of timescapes, we will investigate the transformation of a security to a risk culture in Dutch post war history. We will test Ulrich Beck’s paradigm of the risk society with respect to the Dutch policy arena, and we will analyze what drove this postulated transformation in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, not the 1970s/1980s, but the 1990s saw the onset of this change. Concrete trigger moments and the rise of a new populist movement around 1999 signalled the beginning of this new mode of risk governance that was consolidated after 2001. With this description, an attempt to historicize the development of an all encompassing national security culture is provided.

Most biographies on criminals have been written by journalists. Dutch writer and former journalist Sytze van der Zee wrote portraits of two serial killers. In order to reconstruct the criminal facts and the police investigations in both cases, he collected data by gathering as much documents as possible, and by interviewing the main characters. For the second biography, he had many conversations with the serial killer. In this interview, Sytze van der Zee tells about his motivation to write these books, the research methods he used, the reliability of the collected information, and his experiences while researching.