A. Dirk Moses

Chapel Hill

Rhetorical Excess and Discursive Defensiveness in German Debates

This paper will analyze rhetorical excess—exaggerated and inaccurate claims—and discursive defensiveness—advancing tendentious arguments for the status quo—in German debates about the Holocaust, antisemitism, postcolonialism and the Middle East.

A. Dirk Moses is Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021) and is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.