Historical negationism

Historical negationism, also called historical denialism, is the falsification, trivialization, or distortion of the historical record. This is distinct from historical revisionism, a broader term encompassing academic reinterpretations of history driven by new evidence or reasoning. In attempting to revise and influence how the past is seen, historical negationism acts as illegitimate historical revisionism by using 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 traditional or modern texts.

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others have more permissive policy for various reasons, such as protection of free speech. Others have in the past mandated negationist views, such as the US state of California, where it is claimed that some schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide. Notable examples of negationism include the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the clean Wehrmacht myth, and denials of the Holocaust, Nakba, Holodomor, the Armenian genocide and the Nanjing Massacre. In literature, it has been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via political, religious agendas through state media, mainstream media, and new media, such as the Internet.

Origin of the term

The term negationism (négationnisme) was first coined by the French historian Henry Rousso in his 1987 book The Vichy Syndrome which looked at the French popular memory of Vichy France and the French Resistance. Rousso posited that it was necessary to distinguish between legitimate historical revisionism in Holocaust studies and politically motivated denial of the Holocaust, which he termed negationism.