pact of silence

plural pacts of silence · alternative pact of forgetting

1. idiomaticA tacit agreement not to discuss a certain topic

   The pact of silence refers to the tacit agreement that the divisive issues of the past should be removed from the public sphere (a sort of gag rule).

   2020, The Oxford Handbook of Spanish Politics, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 44

   1 more example

   From the late 1950s to the early 2000s there has been a Parsonian normative solidarity between the state and civil society actors, a pact of silence that guarded the extent of periodic race crimes during the Ottoman and Republican eras—that is, the Thrace events of the 1930s against Jews, the Dersim Genocide, the Kurdish deportation in the late 1930s which included the deportation of “the remnants of the sword” (the leftover Armenians), the Wealth Tax on Minorities, Twenty Class Conscriptions of Armenian, Greek, and Jewish soldiers, the Istanbul Pogrom of 6–7 September 1955, the 1964 Greek Deportation, the Çorum, Maraş, and Sivas massacres, and the internal displacement of Kurds due to the Turkish-Kurdish war over the last thirty years.

   2015, Ayda Erbal, “The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room”, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, volume 47, number 4, →DOI, pages 783–790