«Ձևավորում ոչնչացման միջոցով» - Միհրան Դաբաղ

Migran Dabag's article "Formation through Annihilation" is devoted to analyzing how the idea of a political "generation" becomes an instrument for legitimizing genocide in the movements of National Socialists and Young Turks.

Introduction and Methodology
The author proceeds from Reinhart Koselleck's thesis on the inseparable connection between the demand for the "formation" of society and the notion of the fundamental malleability of history. Dabag shows that the emergence of the "age of feasibility" rests on three interrelated processes:

the identification of history, politics, and destiny;
the "temporalization of ethics" (T. Maho) — the projection of notions of the "good" into the future;
the conviction that no competing versions of the historical path exist, which justifies the exclusion of "others."

These attitudes, in the author's view, became the foundation of the totalizing projects of societal formation in fascism and National Socialism, in which not only social structure but identity itself becomes subject to transformation.

Key Position: The Concept of "Generation"
The central analytical category of the article is the notion of the politically decisive generation. Dabag critically traces the evolution of this concept — from K. Mannheim through H. Jäger, D. Peukert, U. Herbert to R. Wohl and J. Reulecke — demonstrating the shift from an understanding of generation as a "natural" age cohort to its conception as a construct and political project. Citing R. Wohl's definition ("historical generations are not born; they are made"), the author emphasizes that "generation" is a referential and identificational system, not a biological fact.

Generation and "Criminal Society"
Employing the category of "society of perpetrators" that he introduced earlier (developing R. Hilberg's ideas on the heterogeneity of participants in the Holocaust), Dabag raises the question of the mechanisms that form such a society. He identifies three research perspectives:

the new generation's claim to shape history and society;
the incorporation of this claim into generational knowledge and discourse;
the significance of the generational construct for legitimizing mass violence.

Significance for Genocide Research
The author argues that a politically homogeneous society is formed not through terror as such, but through a program of values and norms, correlated with traditional models, into which various social and professional groups are drawn. The actors' self-definition as a decisive generation — one that is conscious of history's malleability and prepared for radical action, up to and including the annihilation of the "other" — is treated as a key factor in the consensus surrounding the politics of extermination.

Conclusion
The article's ultimate conclusion is that understanding the genesis and structure of genocide requires not so much an analysis of the instruments of terror as an investigation into how a political generation constructs its own identity, motivations, and legitimation through its claim to the total formation of society and the future.