Historical negationism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Historical negationism, also called denialism, is a distortion of the historical record. It is often imprecisely referred to as historical revisionism, but that term also applies to legitimate academic reinterpretations of the historical record that diverge from previously accepted views.
In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.
Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; others mandate negationist views.
Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian Genocide denial, Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese war crime denial and the denial of Soviet crimes.
In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.
See also
- Academic integrity
- Ash heap of history
- Big lie
- Black legend
- Cognitive dissonance
- Damnatio memoriae
- Doublethink
- Dunning School
- History wars (Australia)
- Information warfare
- Memory hole
- National memory
- Selective omission – biases to taboo some elements of a collective memory .
Cases of denialism
- Denial of the Holodomor
- Genocide denial – lists a number of particular cases
- North–South divide in Taiwan
- Temple denial
- Waffen-SS in popular culture
