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Concept
Historical negationism
Summary
Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with historical revisionism, a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. 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, such as California, where schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide. Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, Turkish textbook controversies, denial of Kurds by Turkey, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese history textbook controversies, Marcos family denial, Holodomor denial and historiography in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Some notable historical negationists include Ilham Aliyev, Arthur Butz, Grover Furr, Shinzo Abe, Shudo Higashinakano, David Irving, Bongbong Marcos, Keith Windschuttle, and Ernst Zundel. 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.
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.
Official source
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