<![CDATA[Historical violence is continually renarrated to young readers through short stories, yet the lexical choices that shape such representations are rarely questioned. The issue becomes sharper when the short stories appear in a state-issued textbook, because they have passed through official selection and are read by almost every student at that level, so their wording carries institutional legitimacy. This study aims to describe the lexical construction of historical violence at the textual dimension, to explain how the discursive practice of producing, distributing, and consuming the texts shapes its meaning, and to account for the sociocultural practice behind it. The study applies a qualitative descriptive interpretative design with the critical discourse analysis model of Norman Fairclough. The data consist of 75 lexical units taken from three historically themed short stories in Chapter 3 of the Grade XI Indonesian Language textbook of the Merdeka Curriculum, collected through documentation and close reading, classified by lexicalization device and by type of violence, and verified through theoretical and source triangulation. The findings show that the naming of perpetrators shifts according to the political distance of the event from the state today: colonial perpetrators are named completely, perpetrators of the 1948 conflict are named but attributed to hearsay, while state actors after 1965 are never named. The asymmetry between perpetrator and victim reverses accordingly, and euphemism proves not to be a monopoly of power. Critical potential thus resides in the wording of the texts but is left unactivated by the surrounding pedagogy.]]>
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