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Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with ''
historical revisionism In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or times ...
'', a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history."The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians
Deborah Lipstadt Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian, best known as author of the books '' Denying the Holocaust'' (1993), ''History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier'' (2005), ''The Eichmann Trial'' (2011), and ...
(1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about an historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a re-examination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a 'certain body of irrefutable evidence' or a 'convergence of evidence' that suggest that an event – like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust – did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence. ... " Ronald J. Berger. ''Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach'', Aldine Transaction, 2002, , p. 154.
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.''Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial'', by Richard J. Evans, 2001, . p. 145. The author is a professor of Modern History, at the
University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
, and was a major expert-witness in the ''Irving v. Lipstadt'' trial; the book presents his perspective of the trial, and the expert-witness report, including his research about the Dresden death count.
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 Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recog ...
; 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 Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements: ...
, Armenian genocide denial, the
Lost Cause of the Confederacy The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical negationist mythology that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Fir ...
, the myth of the clean ''Wehrmacht'',
Japanese history textbook controversies Japanese history textbook controversies involve controversial content in government-approved history textbooks used in the secondary education (junior high schools and high schools) of Japan. The controversies primarily concern the nationalis ...
,
Holodomor denial Holodomor denial ( uk, заперечення Голодомору, translit=zaperechennia Holodomoru) is the claim that the Holodomor, a large-scale, man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932–1933, did not occur.Richard Pipes, '' Russia ...
and
historiography in the Soviet Union Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography i ...
during the
Stalin era Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
.Klaus Mehnert, ''Stalin Versus Marx: the Stalinist historical doctrine'' (Translation of ''Weltrevolution durch Weltgeschichte'') Port Washington NY: Kennikat Press 1972 (1952), on the illegitimate use of history in the 1934–1952 period.Roger D. Markwick, ''Rewriting history in Soviet Russia : the politics of revisionist historiography, 1956–1974'' New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, on legitimate Soviet historiography particularly in the post 1956 period. Some notable historical negationists include Grover Furr,
Arthur Butz Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University and a Holocaust denier, best known as the author of the pseudohistorical book ''The Hoax of the Twentieth Century''. He achieved tenure in 1974 and curr ...
,
David Irving David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
,
Ernst Zundel Ernst is both a surname and a given name, the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian form of Ernest. Notable people with the name include: Surname * Adolf Ernst (1832–1899) German botanist known by the author abbreviation "Ernst" * Anton Ernst (1975- ...
, Shudo Higashinakano,
Shinzo Abe Shinzo Abe ( ; ja, 安倍 晋三, Hepburn: , ; 21 September 1954 – 8 July 2022) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 20 ...
,
Bongbong Marcos Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr. ( , , ; born September 13, 1957), commonly referred to by the initials PBBM or BBM, is a Filipino politician who is the 17th and current president of the Philippines. He previously served as a sen ...
, and Keith Windschuttle. In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as ''
Nineteen Eighty-Four ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also stylised as ''1984'') is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and fina ...
'', by
George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalit ...
. In modern times, negationism may spread via
new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...
, such as the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
.


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 Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remember ...
of
Vichy France Vichy France (french: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was the fascist French state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. Officially independent, but with half of its t ...
and the
French Resistance The French Resistance (french: La Résistance) was a collection of organisations that fought the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazi occupation of France and the Collaborationism, collaborationist Vichy France, Vichy régim ...
. Rousso posited that it was necessary to distinguish between legitimate
historical revisionism In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or times ...
in Holocaust studies and politically motivated denial of the Holocaust, which he termed negationism.


Purposes

Usually, the purpose of historical negation is to achieve a national, political aim, by transferring war guilt, demonizing an enemy, providing an illusion of victory, or preserving a friendship.Harold D. Lasswell
Propaganda Technique in World War I.
1927, MIT Press, pp. xxii–xxvii
Sometimes the purpose of a revised history is to sell more books or to attract attention with a newspaper headline.Matthew d'Ancona
History men battle over Britain's future.
The Times, 9 May 1994; ProQuest Database (. Retrieved 12 October 2011).
The historian
James M. McPherson James Munro McPherson (born October 11, 1936) is an American Civil War historian, and is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University. He received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for '' Battle Cry ...
said that negationists would want revisionist history understood as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present".McPherson disagrees with this as the sole definition of revisionist history – he argues rightly that revisionism (academically) is the 'lifeblood of history.' James McPherson
Revisionist Historians
Perspectives, 2003. American Historical Association.


Ideological influence

The principal functions of negationist history are the abilities to control ideological influence and to control political influence. In "History Men Battle over Britain's Future", Michael d'Ancona said that historical negationists "seem to have been given a collective task in nation's cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: To redefine ationalstatus in a changing world".Matthew d'Ancona
History men battle over Britain's future.
The Times, 9 May 1994; ProQuest Database (Retrieved 12 October 2011).
History is a social resource that contributes to shaping national identity, culture, and the public memory. Through the study of history, people are imbued with a particular cultural identity; therefore, by negatively revising history, the negationist can craft a specific, ideological identity. Because historians are credited as people who single-mindedly pursue truth, by way of fact, negationist historians capitalize on the historian's professional credibility, and present their pseudohistory as true scholarship. By adding a measure of credibility to the work of revised history, the ideas of the negationist historian are more readily accepted in the public mind. As such, professional historians recognize the revisionist practice of historical negationism as the work of "truth-seekers" finding different truths in the historical record to fit their political, social, and ideological contexts.


Political influence

History provides insight into past political policies and consequences, and thus assists people in extrapolating political implications for contemporary society. Historical negationism is applied to cultivate a specific political myth, sometimes with official consent from the government, whereby self-taught, amateur, and dissident academic
historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...
s either manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. Since the late 1930s in the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, the
ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union The ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Bolshevist Marxism–Leninism, an ideology of a centralised command economy with a vanguardist one-party state to realise the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Un ...
and
historiography in the Soviet Union Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography i ...
treated
reality Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, re ...
and the party line as the same intellectual entity, especially in regards to the
Russian Civil War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Russian Civil War , partof = the Russian Revolution and the aftermath of World War I , image = , caption = Clockwise from top left: {{flatlist, *Soldiers ...
and peasants rebellions; Soviet historical negationism advanced a specific, political, and ideological agenda about Russia and its place in world history.


Techniques

Historical negationism applies the techniques of research, quotation, and presentation for
deception Deception or falsehood is an act or statement that misleads, hides the truth, or promotes a belief, concept, or idea that is not true. It is often done for personal gain or advantage. Deception can involve dissimulation, propaganda and sleight o ...
of the reader and denial of the historical record. In support of the "revised history" perspective, the negationist historian uses
false documents A false document is a technique by which an author aims to increase verisimilitude in a work of fiction by inventing and inserting or mentioning documents that appear to be factual. The goal of a false document is to convince an audience that what ...
as genuine sources, presents specious reasons to distrust genuine documents, exploits published opinions by quoting out of historical context, manipulates
statistics Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...
, and mistranslates texts in other languages. The revision techniques of historical negationism operate in the intellectual space of public debate for the advancement of a given interpretation of history and the cultural perspective of the "revised history".Dionne, E.J. Jr
Cold War Scholars Fault Stalin: Soviet Historians Lean to U.S. View
The Washington Post. 26 July 1990. LexisNexis Database (Retrieved 12 October 2011). First Section, p. A3.
As a document, the revised history is used to negate the validity of the factual, documentary record, and so reframe explanations and perceptions of the discussed historical event, to deceive the reader, the listener, and the viewer; therefore, historical negationism functions as a technique of
propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
.Nagorski, Andrew
Russia's New Normal: The Cold War may be over, but that doesn't mean the threat from the Kremlin has entirely disappeared.
Newsweek; World Affairs. 17 March 2008. LexisNexis Database(. Retrieved 12 October 2011)Vol. 151 No 11.
Rather than submit their works for
peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
, negationist historians rewrite history and use logical fallacies to construct arguments that will obtain the desired results, a "revised history" that supports an agenda – political, ideological, religious, etc. In the practice of
historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians h ...
, the British historian Richard J. Evans describes the technical differences, between professional historians and negationist historians, commenting: "Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account, and, if necessary, amend their own case, accordingly. They do not present, as genuine, documents which they know to be forged, just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious, but implausible, and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents, because these documents run counter to their arguments; again, they amend their arguments, if this is the case, or, indeed, abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources, which, in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability, or otherwise, simply because they want, for whatever reason, to maximize the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures, as impartially as possible, to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not willfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events, for which there is no historical evidence, to make their arguments more plausible." Richard J. Evans. David Irving, Hitler and Holocaust Denial: Electronic Edition
6. General Conclusion
Paragraphs 6.20,6.21


Deception

Deception includes falsifying information, obscuring the truth, and lying to manipulate public opinion about the historical event discussed in the revised history. The negationist historian applies the techniques of deception to achieve either a political or an ideological goal, or both. The field of history distinguishes among history books based upon credible, verifiable sources, which were
peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...
before publication; and deceptive history books, based upon unreliable sources, which were not submitted for peer review. The distinction among types of history books rests upon the research techniques used in writing a history. Verifiability, accuracy, and openness to criticism are central tenets of historical
scholarship A scholarship is a form of financial aid awarded to students for further education. Generally, scholarships are awarded based on a set of criteria such as academic merit, diversity and inclusion, athletic skill, and financial need. Scholars ...
. When these techniques are sidestepped, the presented historical information might be deliberately deceptive, a "revised history".


Denial

Denial is defensively protecting information from being shared with other historians, and claiming that facts are untrue, especially denial of the war crimes and
crimes against humanity Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
perpetrated in the course of the
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
(1939–45) and the
Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
(1933–45). The negationist historian protects the historical-revisionism project by blame shifting, censorship, distraction, and
media manipulation Media manipulation is a series of related techniques in which partisans create an image or argument that favors their particular interests. Such tactics may include the use of logical fallacies, manipulation, outright deception (disinformation ...
; occasionally, denial by protection includes risk management for the physical security of revisionist sources.


Relativization and trivialization

Comparing certain historical atrocities to other crimes is the practice of relativization, interpretation by moral judgements, to alter public perception of the first historical atrocity. Although such comparisons often occur in negationist history, their pronouncement is not usually part of revisionist intentions upon the historical facts, but an opinion of moral judgement. * The Holocaust and
Nazism Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) i ...
: The historian
Deborah Lipstadt Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian, best known as author of the books '' Denying the Holocaust'' (1993), ''History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier'' (2005), ''The Eichmann Trial'' (2011), and ...
says that the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the
expulsion of Germans after World War II Expulsion or expelled may refer to: General * Deportation * Ejection (sports) * Eviction * Exile * Expeller pressing * Expulsion (education) * Expulsion from the United States Congress * Extradition * Forced migration * Ostracism * Persona ...
from Nazi-colonized lands and the formal Allied war crimes, is at the centre of, and is a continually repeated theme of, contemporary
Holocaust denial Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements: ...
, and that such relativization presents "immoral equivalencies". * Proponents of the
Lost Cause of the Confederacy The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical negationist mythology that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Fir ...
often use historical examples of non-
chattel slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to per ...
to claim that enslaved white and black slaves faced the same conditions. While other forms are abhorrent, only the former involves legally-mandated generational slavery. * Connected to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy is the Irish slaves myth, a pseudo-historical narrative which conflates the experiences of Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans in the
Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America, North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. ...
. This myth, which was historically promoted by
Irish nationalists Irish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which, in its broadest sense, asserts that the people of Ireland should govern Ireland as a sovereign state. Since the mid-19th century, Irish nationalism has largely taken the form of cu ...
such as
John Mitchel John Mitchel ( ga, Seán Mistéal; 3 November 1815 – 20 March 1875) was an Irish nationalist activist, author, and political journalist. In the Famine years of the 1840s he was a leading writer for ''The Nation'' newspaper produced by the ...
, has in the modern-day been promoted by white supremacists in the United States to negate the mistreatment experienced by
African Americans African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
(such as
racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagoni ...
and segregation) and oppose demands for
slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
reparations Reparation(s) may refer to: Christianity * Restitution (theology), the Christian doctrine calling for reparation * Acts of reparation, prayers for repairing the damages of sin History *War reparations **World War I reparations, made from ...
.


Examples


Book burning

Repositories of literature have been targeted throughout history (e.g., the
Library of Alexandria The Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. The Library was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, which was dedicated to the Muses, t ...
, Grand Library of Baghdad), burning of the liturgical and historical books of the
St. Thomas Christians The Saint Thomas Christians, also called Syrian Christians of India, ''Marthoma Suriyani Nasrani'', ''Malankara Nasrani'', or ''Nasrani Mappila'', are an ethno-religious community of Indian Christians in the state of Kerala (Malabar region), ...
by the
archbishop of Goa The Roman Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese of Goa and Daman ( la, Archidioecesis Goanae et Damanensis, gom, Gõy ani Damanv Mha-Dhormprant, pt, Arquidiocese de Goa e Damão) encompasses the Goa state and the Damaon territory in the Konkan r ...
Aleixo de Menezes Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes or Alexeu de Jesu de Meneses (25 January 1559 – 3 May 1617) was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Goa, Archbishop of Braga, Portugal, and Viceroy of Portugal during the Philippine Dynasty. Biographical sketch Aleixo w ...
, including recently, such as the 1981 Burning of Jaffna library and the destruction of Iraqi libraries by
ISIS Isis (; ''Ēse''; ; Meroitic: ''Wos'' 'a''or ''Wusa''; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎, romanized: ʾs) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kin ...
during the fall of Mosul in 2014. Similarly, British officials would destroy documents in
Operation Legacy Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) programme to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was ...
to avoid records on colonial rule to fall into hands of countries declaring independence from Britain and scrutiny of the British state.


Chinese book burning

The ''
Burning of books and burying of scholars The burning of books and burying of scholars (), also known as burning the books and executing the ru scholars, refers to the purported burning of texts in 213 BCE and live burial of 460 Confucian scholars in 212 BCE by the Chinese emperor ...
'' (), or "Fires of Qin", refers to the burning of writings and slaughter of scholars during the
Qin Dynasty The Qin dynasty ( ; zh, c=秦朝, p=Qín cháo, w=), or Ch'in dynasty in Wade–Giles romanization ( zh, c=, p=, w=Ch'in ch'ao), was the first dynasty of Imperial China. Named for its heartland in Qin state (modern Gansu and Shaanxi), ...
of
Ancient China The earliest known written records of the history of China date from as early as 1250 BC, from the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BC), during the reign of king Wu Ding. Ancient historical texts such as the '' Book of Documents'' (early chapt ...
, between the period of 213 and 210 BC. "Books" at this point refers to writings on bamboo strips, which were then bound together. This contributed to the loss to history of many philosophical theories of proper government (known as "the
Hundred Schools of Thought The Hundred Schools of Thought () were philosophies and schools that flourished from the 6th century BC to 221 BC during the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period of ancient China. An era of substantial discrimination in China ...
"). The official philosophy of government (" legalism") survived.


United States history


Confederate revisionism

The historical negationism of
American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and t ...
revisionists and Neo-Confederates claims that the
Confederate States The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States or the Confederacy was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confeder ...
(1861–65) were the defenders rather than the instigators of the
American Civil War The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by Names of the American Civil War, other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union (American Civil War), Union ("the North") and t ...
, and that the Confederacy's motivation for secession from the United States was the maintenance of the Southern
states' rights In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the ...
and limited government, rather than the preservation and expansion of
chattel slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to per ...
. Regarding Neo-Confederate revisionism of the U.S. Civil War, the historian Brooks D. Simpson says: "This is an active attempt to reshape historical memory, an effort by white Southerners to find historical justifications for present-day actions. The neo–Confederate movement's ideologues have grasped that if they control how people remember the past, they'll control how people approach the present and the future. Ultimately, this is a very conscious war for memory and heritage. It's a quest for
legitimacy Legitimacy, from the Latin ''legitimare'' meaning "to make lawful", may refer to: * Legitimacy (criminal law) * Legitimacy (family law) * Legitimacy (political) See also * Bastard (law of England and Wales) * Illegitimacy in fiction * Legit (d ...
, the eternal quest for justification." In the early 20th century, Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the
United Daughters of the Confederacy The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, ...
(UDC), led the attack against
American history The history of the lands that became the United States began with the arrival of the first people in the Americas around 15,000 BC. Numerous indigenous cultures formed, and many saw transformations in the 16th century away from more densel ...
textbooks that did not present the "
Lost Cause of the Confederacy The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical negationist mythology that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Fir ...
" version of the history of the U.S. Civil War. To that pedagogical end, Rutherford assembled a "massive collection" of documents that included "essay contests on the glory of the
Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Cat ...
and personal tributes to faithful slaves". About the historical negationism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the historian
David Blight David William Blight (born 1949) is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previous ...
says: "All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently
racist Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism ...
as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the
white supremacist White supremacy or white supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White s ...
vision of Civil War memory."


California genocide

Between 1846 and 1873, following the
conquest of California The Conquest of California, also known as the Conquest of Alta California or the California Campaign, was an important military campaign of the Mexican–American War carried out by the United States in Alta California (modern-day California), t ...
by the United States, the region's
Indigenous Californian The indigenous peoples of California (known as Native Californians) are the indigenous inhabitants who have lived or currently live in the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after the arrival of Europeans. ...
population plummeted from around 150,000 to around 30,000 due to disease, famine, forced removals, slavery, and massacres. Many historians refer to the massacres as the California genocide. Between 9,500 and 16,000 California Natives were killed by both government forces and white settlers in massacres during this period. Despite the well documented evidence of the widespread massacres and atrocities, the public school curriculum and history textbooks approved by the
California Department of Education The California Department of Education is an agency within the Government of California that oversees public education. The department oversees funding and testing, and holds local educational agencies accountable for student achievement. Its sta ...
ignore the history of this genocide. According to author Clifford Trafzer, although many historians have pushed for recognition of the genocide in public school curricula, government-approved textbooks omit mention of the genocide because of the dominance of conservative publishing companies with an ideological impetus to deny the genocide, the fear of publishing companies being branded as un-American for discussing it, and the unwillingness of state and federal government officials to acknowledge the genocide due to the possibility of having to pay reparations to indigenous communities affected by it.


War crimes


Japanese war crimes

The post-war minimization of the war crimes of Japanese imperialism is an example of "illegitimate" historical revisionism; some contemporary Japanese revisionists, such as Yūko Iwanami (granddaughter of General
Hideki Tojo Hideki Tojo (, ', December 30, 1884 – December 23, 1948) was a Japanese politician, general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), and convicted war criminal who served as prime minister of Japan and president of the Imperial Rule Assistan ...
), propose that Japan's invasion of China, and
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, itself, were justified reactions to the racist Western imperialism of the time. On 2 March 2007, Japanese prime minister
Shinzō Abe Shinzo Abe ( ; ja, 安倍 晋三, Hepburn: , ; 21 September 1954 – 8 July 2022) was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 20 ...
denied that the military had forced women into
sexual slavery Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is an attachment of any ownership right over one or more people with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in sexual activities. This includes forced labor, reducing a person to a ...
during the war, saying, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion". Before he spoke, some Liberal Democratic Party legislators also sought to revise Yōhei Kōno's apology to former
comfort women Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese '' ian ...
in 1993; likewise, there was the controversial negation of the six-week
Nanking Massacre The Nanjing Massacre (, ja, 南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as ''Nanking'') was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the ...
in 1937–1938. Shinzō Abe was general secretary of a group of parliament members concerned with history education (Japanese: 日本の前途と歴史教育を考える若手議員の会) that is associated with the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and was a special advisor to , which are two openly revisionist groups denying, downplaying, or justifying various
Japanese war crimes The Empire of Japan committed war crimes in many Asian-Pacific countries during the period of Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars. These incidents have been described as an "Asian Holocaust". Som ...
. Editor-in-chief of the conservative ''
Yomiuri Shimbun The (lit. ''Reading-selling Newspaper'' or ''Selling by Reading Newspaper'') is a Japanese newspaper published in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, and other major Japanese cities. It is one of the five major newspapers in Japan; the other four are ...
''
Tsuneo Watanabe is a Japanese journalist and businessman. He is the Representative Director, Editor-in-Chief of the Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings company, which publishes the largest Japanese daily newspaper ''Yomiuri Shimbun'' and substantially controls the largest J ...
criticized the
Yasukuni Shrine is a Shinto shrine located in Chiyoda, Tokyo. It was founded by Emperor Meiji in June 1869 and commemorates those who died in service of Japan, from the Boshin War of 1868–1869, to the two Sino-Japanese Wars, 1894–1895 and 1937–1945 resp ...
as a bastion of revisionism: "The Yasukuni Shrine runs a museum where they show items in order to encourage and worship militarism. It's wrong for the prime minister to visit such a place". Other critics note that men, who would contemporarily be perceived as "Korean" and "Chinese", are enshrined for the military actions they effected as Japanese Imperial subjects.


Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings

The ''
Hibakusha ''Hibakusha'' ( or ; ja, 被爆者 or ; "person affected by a bomb" or "person affected by exposure o radioactivity) is a word of Japanese origin generally designating the people affected by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at th ...
'' ("explosion-affected people") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seek compensation from their government and criticize it for failing to "accept responsibility for having instigated and then prolonged an aggressive war long after Japan's defeat was apparent, resulting in a heavy toll in Japanese, Asian and American lives". Historians Hill and Koshiro have stated that attempts to minimize the importance of the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki The United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the onl ...
is revisionist history.
EB Sledge Eugene Bondurant Sledge (November 4, 1923 – March 3, 2001) was a United States Marine, university professor, and author. His 1981 memoir ''With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa'' chronicled his combat experiences during World War I ...
expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings to be forgotten.


Croatian war crimes in World War II

Some Croats, including some high-ranked officials and political leaders during the 1990s and far-right organization members, have attempted to minimize the magnitude of the genocide perpetrated against Serbs and other ethnic minorities in the World War II
puppet state A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government, is a state that is ''de jure'' independent but ''de facto'' completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders.Compare: Puppet states have nominal sove ...
of
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
, the
Independent State of Croatia The Independent State of Croatia ( sh, Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH; german: Unabhängiger Staat Kroatien; it, Stato indipendente di Croazia) was a World War II-era puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (1922–1943), Fascist It ...
. By 1989, the future President of Croatia
Franjo Tuđman Franjo Tuđman (; 14 May 1922 – 10 December 1999), also written as Franjo Tudjman, was a Croatian politician and historian. Following the country's independence from Yugoslavia, he became the first president of Croatia and served as p ...
(who had been a Partisan during World War II), had embraced
Croatian nationalism Croatian nationalism is nationalism that asserts the nationality of Croats and promotes the cultural unity of Croats. Modern Croatian nationalism first arose in the 19th century after Budapest exerted increasing pressure for Magyarization of Cro ...
and published '' Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy'', in which he questioned the official number of victims killed by the
Ustaše The Ustaše (), also known by anglicised versions Ustasha or Ustashe, was a Croats, Croatian Fascism, fascist and ultranationalism, ultranationalist organization active, as one organization, between 1929 and 1945, formally known as the Ustaš ...
during the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
, particularly at the Jasenovac concentration camp. Yugoslav and Serbian historiography had long exaggerated the number of victims at the camp. Tuđman criticized the long-standing figures, but also described the camp as a "work camp", giving an estimate of between 30,000 and 40,000 deaths. Tuđman's government's toleration of Ustaša symbols and their crimes often dismissed in public, frequently strained relations with Israel. Croatia's far-right often advocates the false theory that Jasenovac was a "labour camp" where mass murder did not take place. In 2017, two videos of former Croatian president Stjepan Mesić from 1992 were made public in which he stated that Jasenovac wasn't a death camp. The far-right NGO "The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp" also advocates this disproven theory, in addition to claiming that the camp was used by the Yugoslav authorities following the war to imprison Ustasha members and regular Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951. Its members include journalist Igor Vukić, who wrote his own book advocating the theory, Catholic priest Stjepan Razum and academic
Josip Pečarić Josip Pečarić (born 2 September 1948) is a Croatian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics in the Faculty of Textile Technology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and is a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. ...
. The ideas promoted by its members have been amplified by mainstream media interviews and book tours. The last book, "The Jasenovac Lie Revealed" written by Vukić, prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Center to urge Croatian authorities to ban such works, noting that they "would immediately be banned in Germany and Austria and rightfully so". In 2016, Croatian filmmaker
Jakov Sedlar Jakov Sedlar (born 6 November 1952) is a Croatian film director and producer. A former cultural attaché during the 1990s in the Franjo Tuđman government, his documentaries promote Croatian nationalist views through propaganda. His 2016 docume ...
released a documentary '' Jasenovac – The Truth'' which advocated the same theories, labeling the camp as a "collection and labour camp". The film contained alleged falsifications and forgeries, in addition to denial of crimes and hate speech towards politicians and journalists.


Serbian war crimes in World War II

Among far-right and nationalist groups, denial and revisionism of Serbian war crimes are carried out through the downplaying of Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić's roles in the extermination of Serbia's Jews in concentration camps, in the German-occupied Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia by a number of Serbian historians. Serbian collaborationist armed forces were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of Jews as well as Roma and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance and the killing of many Croats and Muslims. Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders. In 1993, the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Serbica, sr-Cyr, Српска академија наука и уметности, САНУ, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU) is a national academy and the ...
listed Nedić among '' The 100 most prominent Serbs''. There is also the denial of
Chetnik The Chetniks ( sh-Cyrl-Latn, Четници, Četnici, ; sl, Četniki), formally the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, and also the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland and the Ravna Gora Movement, was a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationa ...
collaboration with Axis forces and crimes committed during World War II. Serbian historian Jelena Djureinovic poists in her book ''The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution'' that "during those years, the WWII nationalist Chetniks have been recast as an
anti-fascist Anti-fascism is a political movement in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups and individuals. Beginning in European countries in the 1920s, it was at its most significant shortly before and during World War II, where the Axis powers wer ...
movement equivalent to
Tito Tito may refer to: People Mononyms *Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), commonly known mononymously as Tito, Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman *Roberto Arias (1918–1989), aka Tito, Panamanian international lawyer, diplomat, and journal ...
's Partisans, and as victims of communism". The glorification of the Chetnik movement has now become the central theme of Serbia's WWII memory politics. Chetnik leaders convicted under communist rule of
collaboration with the Nazis In World War II, many governments, organizations and individuals collaborationism, collaborated with the Axis powers, "out of conviction, desperation, or under coercion." Nationalists sometimes welcomed German or Italian troops, believing they ...
have been rehabilitated by Serbian courts, and television programmes have contributed to spreading a positive image of the movement, "distorting the real picture of what happened during WWII".


Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars

There have been a number of far-right and nationalist authors and political activists who have publicly disagreed with mainstream views of Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of 1991–1999. Some high-ranked Serbian officials and political leaders who categorically claimed that no genocide against Bosnian Muslims took place at all, include former president of Serbia
Tomislav Nikolić Tomislav Nikolić ( sr-Cyrl, Томислав Николић, ; born 15 February 1952) is a Serbian retired politician who served as the president of Serbia from 2012 to 2017. A former member of the far-right Serbian Radical Party (SRS), he di ...
, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, Serbian Minister of Defence Aleksandar Vulin and Serbian far-right leader Vojislav Šešelj. Among the points of contention are whether the victims of massacres such as the
Račak massacre The Račak massacre ( sq, Masakra e Reçakut) or Račak operation ( sr, Акција Рачак/Akcija Račak) was the massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanians that took place in the village of Račak ( sq, Reçak) in central Kosovo in January 1999. Th ...
and
Srebrenica massacre The Srebrenica massacre ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Masakr u Srebrenici, Масакр у Сребреници), also known as the Srebrenica genocide ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Genocid u Srebrenici, Геноцид у Сребрен ...
were unarmed civilians or armed resistance fighters, whether death and rape tolls were inflated, and whether prison camps such as
Sremska Mitrovica camp Sremska Mitrovica Prison (Serbian: Казнено-поправни завод у Сремској Митровици / ''Kazneno-popravni zavod u Sremskoj Mitrovici'') is the biggest prison in Serbia, consisting of two facilities. It is situated i ...
were sites of mass war crimes. These authors are called "revisionists" by scholars and organizations, such as
ICTY The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal ...
. The '' Report about Case Srebrenica'' by Darko Trifunovic, commissioned by the government of the
Republika Srpska Republika Srpska ( sr-Cyrl, Република Српска, lit=Serb Republic, also known as Republic of Srpska, ) is one of the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is located ...
,Gordana Katana (a correspondent with Voice of America in Banja Luka)
REGIONAL REPORT: Bosnian Serbs Play Down Srebrenica
website of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. Retrieved 25 October 2009
was described by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal ...
as "one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995". Outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures eventually forced the Republika Srpska to disown the report. In 2017 legislation that banned the teaching of the
Srebrenica genocide The Srebrenica massacre ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Masakr u Srebrenici, Масакр у Сребреници), also known as the Srebrenica genocide ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Genocid u Srebrenici, Геноцид у Сребрен ...
and Sarajevo siege in schools was introduced in Republika Srpska, initiated by President Milorad Dodik and his SNSD party, who stated that it was "impossible to use here the textbooks … which say the Serbs have committed genocide and kept Sarajevo under siege. This is not correct and this will not be taught here". In 2019 Republika Srpska authorities appointed Israeli historian Gideon Greif – who has worked at
Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...
for more than three decades - to head its own revisionist commission to "determine the truth" about Srebrenica.


Turkey and the Armenian genocide

Turkish laws such as Article 301, that state "a person who publicly insults
Turkishness Kemalism ( tr, Kemalizm, also archaically ''Kamâlizm''), also known as Atatürkism ( tr, Atatürkçülük, Atatürkçü düşünce), or The Six Arrows ( tr, Altı Ok), is the founding official ideology of the Republic of Turkey.Eric J. Zurcher ...
, or the Republic or heTurkish
Grand National Assembly of Turkey The Grand National Assembly of Turkey ( tr, ), usually referred to simply as the TBMM or Parliament ( tr, or ''Parlamento''), is the unicameral Turkish legislature. It is the sole body given the legislative prerogatives by the Turkish Cons ...
, shall be punishable by imprisonment", were used to criminally charge the writer
Orhan Pamuk Ferit Orhan Pamuk (born 7 June 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three lan ...
with disrespecting Turkey, for saying that "Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million
Armenians Armenians ( hy, հայեր, ''hayer'' ) are an ethnic group native to the Armenian highlands of Western Asia. Armenians constitute the main population of Armenia and the ''de facto'' independent Artsakh. There is a wide-ranging diaspora ...
, were killed in these lands, and nobody, but me, dares to talk about it". The controversy occurred as Turkey was first vying for membership in the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
(EU) where the suppression of dissenters is looked down upon.Madeleine Brand speaks with Hugh Pope
Charges Against Turkish Writer Pamuk Dropped
' NPR 25 January 2005.
Article 301 originally was part of penal-law reforms meant to modernize Turkey to
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
standards, as part of negotiating Turkey's accession to the EU. In 2006, the charges were dropped due to pressure from the European Union and United States on the Turkish government. On 7 February 2006, five journalists were tried for insulting the judicial institutions of the State, and for aiming to prejudice a court case (per Article 288 of the Turkish penal code). The reporters were on trial for criticizing the court-ordered closing of a conference in Istanbul regarding the
Armenian genocide The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through t ...
during the time of the
Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University ...
. The conference continued elsewhere, transferring locations from a state to a private university. The trial continued until 11 April 2006, when four of the reporters were acquitted. The case against the fifth journalist,
Murat Belge Murat Belge (born March 16, 1943) is a Turkish academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, civil rights activist, and occasional tour guide. Career Belge was a member of the organizing committee for a two-day academic conference that st ...
, proceeded until 8 June 2006, when he was also acquitted. The purpose of the conference was to critically analyse the official Turkish view of the Armenian genocide in 1915; a
taboo A taboo or tabu is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, sacred, or allowed only for certain persons.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
subject in Turkey. The trial proved to be a test case between Turkey and the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are located primarily in Europe, Europe. The union has a total area of ...
; the EU insisted that Turkey should allow increased freedom of expression rights, as a condition to membership.


Iran

The Islamic Republic of Iran uses historical negationism against religious minorities in order to maintain legitimacy and relevancy of the regime. One example is the regime's approach to Bahai community. In 2008, the erroneous and misleading biography of Bab was presented to all primary school children. In his official 2013
Nowruz Nowruz ( fa, نوروز, ; ), zh, 诺鲁孜节, ug, نەۋروز, ka, ნოვრუზ, ku, Newroz, he, נורוז, kk, Наурыз, ky, Нооруз, mn, Наурыз, ur, نوروز, tg, Наврӯз, tr, Nevruz, tk, Nowruz, ...
address,
Supreme Leader of Iran The Supreme Leader of Iran ( fa, رهبر ایران, rahbar-e irān) is the head of state of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Supreme Leader directs the executive system and judicial system of the Islamic theocratic government and is the co ...
Grand Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei ( fa, سید علی حسینی خامنه‌ای, ; born 19 April 1939) is a Twelver Shia '' marja and the second and current Supreme Leader of Iran, in office since 1989. He was previously the third presiden ...
questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened." This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.


Soviet history

During the existence of the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR ( rus, Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, Rossíyskaya Sovétskaya Federatívnaya Soci ...
(1917–1991) and the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
(1922–1991), the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union " Hymn of the Bolshevik Party" , headquarters = 4 Staraya Square, Moscow , general_secretary = Vladimir Lenin (first) Mikhail Gorbachev (last) , founded = , banned = , founder = Vladimir Lenin , newspape ...
(CPSU) attempted to ideologically and politically control the writing of both academic and popular history. These attempts were most successful in the 1934–1952 period. According to
Klaus Mehnert Klaus Mehnert (October 10, 1906, Moscow, Russia – January 2, 1984, Freudenstadt, Germany) was a German writer, journalist and academic. He was a correspondent in the Soviet Union; a professor in the United States; a publisher of a German-funde ...
, the Soviets attempt to control academic
historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians h ...
(the writing of history by academic historians) to promote ideological and ethno-racial
imperialism Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, often through employing hard power (economic powe ...
by Russians. During the 1928–1956 period, modern and contemporary history was generally composed according to the wishes of the CPSU, not the requirements of accepted historiographic method. During and after the rule of
Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his rule, Khrushchev s ...
(1956–1964), Soviet historiographic practice was more complicated. Although not entirely corrupted, Soviet historiography was characterized by complex competition between
Stalinist Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory ...
and
anti-Stalinist The anti-Stalinist left is an umbrella term for various kinds of left-wing political movements that opposed Joseph Stalin, Stalinism and the actual system of governance Stalin implemented as leader of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953. Th ...
Marxist historians. To avoid the professional hazard of politicized history, some historians chose pre-modern, medieval history or classical history, where ideological demands were relatively relaxed and conversation with other historians in the field could be fostered; despite the potential danger of proscribed ideology corrupting historians' work, not all of Soviet historiography was corrupt. Control over party history and the legal status of individual ex-party members played a large role in dictating the ideological diversity and thus the faction in power within the CPSU. The official '' History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)'' was revised to delete references to leaders purged from the party, especially during the rule of
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet Union, Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as Ge ...
(1922–1953).An example of changing visual history is the party's motivated practice of altering photographs. In the historiography of the Cold War, a controversy over negationist historical revisionism exists, where numerous revisionist scholars in the West have been accused of whitewashing the crimes of Stalinism, overlooking the
Katyn massacre The Katyn massacre, "Katyń crime"; russian: link=yes, Катынская резня ''Katynskaya reznya'', "Katyn massacre", or russian: link=no, Катынский расстрел, ''Katynsky rasstrel'', "Katyn execution" was a series of m ...
in Poland, disregarding the validity of the
Venona Project The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service (later absorbed by the National Security Agency), which ran from February 1, 1943, until Oc ...
messages with regards to
Soviet espionage in the United States As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals ( resident spies), as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the ...
, as well as the denial of the
Holodomor The Holodomor ( uk, Голодомо́р, Holodomor, ; derived from uk, морити голодом, lit=to kill by starvation, translit=moryty holodom, label=none), also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a man-made famin ...
of 1932–1933.


Azerbaijan


In relation to Armenia

Many scholars, among them Victor Schnirelmann, Victor Schnirelmann: The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia. Senri Ethnological Studies. pp. 160, 196–97: "The republication of classical and medieval sources with omissions, with the replacement of the term "Armenian state" by "Albanian state" and with other distortions of the original manuscripts was another way to play down the Armenian role in early and medieval Transcaucasia. ... The Azeri scholars did all of this by order of the Soviet and Party authorities of Azerbaijan, rather than through free will." Victor Schnirelmann
Why to attribute the dominant views in Azerbaijan to the "world science"?
// REGNUM, 12.02.2013
Translation
Willem Floor Willem Marius Floor (born 1942) is a Dutch historian, writer, and Iranologist. He was born in 1942 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After finishing high school, he attended the University of Utrecht where he studied economics, non-Western sociology, an ...
,Willem M. Floor, Hasan Javadi. "Abbas-Kuli-aga Bakikhanov. The Heavenly Rose-Garden: A History of Shirvan & Daghestan". Mage Publishers, 2008. p. xvi: "This is in particular disturbing because he suppresses, for example, the mention of territory inhabited by Armenians, thus not only falsifying history, but also not respecting Bakikhanov's dictum that a historian should write without prejudice, whether religious, ethnic, political or otherwise" Robert Hewsen,Robert Hewsen. ''Armenia: A Historical Atlas.''
University of Chicago Press The University of Chicago Press is the largest and one of the oldest university presses in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including '' The Chicago Manual of Style' ...
, 2001. p. 291: "Scholars should be on guard when using Soviet and post-Soviet Azeri editions of Azeri, Persian, and even Russian and Western European sources printed in Baku. These have been edited to remove references to Armenians and have been distributed in large numbers in recent years. When utilizing such sources, the researchers should seek out pre-Soviet editions wherever possible."
George Bournoutian George Bournoutian. A brief history of the Aghuankʻ region. Mazda Publishers, 2009. pp. 8–14: "Therefore, in order to substantiate their political claims, Bunyatov and his fellow academics chose to set aside all scholarly integrity and print large numbers of re-edited versions of these not easily accessible primary sources on Karabagh, while deleting or altering references to the Armenians" George Bournoutian. Rewriting History: Recent Azeri Alterations of Primary Sources Dealing with Karabakh] // Research note from Volume 6 of the "Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies" (1992,1993) and others state that in Soviet and post-Soviet
Azerbaijan Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of th ...
since the 1960s there is a practice of revising primary sources on the South Caucasus in which any mention about
Armenians Armenians ( hy, հայեր, ''hayer'' ) are an ethnic group native to the Armenian highlands of Western Asia. Armenians constitute the main population of Armenia and the ''de facto'' independent Artsakh. There is a wide-ranging diaspora ...
is removed. In the revised texts, ''Armenian'' is either simply removed or is replaced by ''Albanian''; there are many other examples of such falsifications, all of which have the purpose of creating an impression that historically Armenians were not present in this territory. Willem M. Floor and Hasan Javadi in the English edition of "The Heavenly Rose-Garden: A History of Shirvan & Daghestan" by Abbasgulu Bakikhanov specifically point out to the instances of distortions and falsifications made by Ziya Bunyadov in his Russian translation of this book. According to Bournoutian and Hewsen these distortions are widespread in these works; they thus advise the readers in general to avoid the books produced in Azerbaijan in Soviet and post-Soviet times if these books do not contain the facsimile copy of original sources. Shnirelman thinks that this practice is being realized in Azerbaijan according to state order. Philip L. Kohl brings an example of a theory advanced by Azerbaijani archeologist Akhundov about Albanian origin of Khachkars as an example of patently false cultural origin myths.Philip L. Kohl, Clare P. Fawcett. Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology. Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 154: "Thus, minimally, two points must be made. Patently false cultural origin myths are not always harmless. The political context within which such myths are articulated is critical, and this context continually changes: given the events of the last nine years, assertion that today's Azerbaijan was the original homeland of Turkic-speaking peoples is charged with political significance" The Armenian cemetery in Julfa, a cemetery near the town of Julfa, in the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan originally housed around 10,000 funerary monuments. The tombstones consisted mainly of thousands of ''
khachkar A ''khachkar'', also known as a ''khatchkar'' or Armenian cross-stone ( hy, խաչքար, , խաչ xačʿ "cross" + քար kʿar "stone") is a carved, memorial stele bearing a cross, and often with additional motifs such as rosettes, in ...
s'', uniquely decorated cross-stones characteristic of medieval Christian
Armenian art Armenian art is the unique form of art developed over the last five millennia in which the Armenian people lived on the Armenian Highland. Armenian architecture and miniature painting have dominated Armenian art and have shown consistent deve ...
. The cemetery was still standing in the late 1990s, when the government of Azerbaijan began a systematic campaign to destroy the monuments. After studying and comparing satellite photos of Julfa taken in 2003 and 2009, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...
came to the conclusion in December 2010 that the cemetery was demolished and leveled. After the director of the
Hermitage Museum The State Hermitage Museum ( rus, Государственный Эрмитаж, r=Gosudarstvennyj Ermitaž, p=ɡəsʊˈdarstvʲɪn(ː)ɨj ɪrmʲɪˈtaʂ, links=no) is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is the larges ...
Mikhail Piotrovsky Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky (russian: Михаил Борисович Пиотровский) is the Director of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Life and career He was born in Yerevan in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Repub ...
expressed his protest about the destruction of Armenian khachkars in Julfa, he was accused by Azerbaijanis of supporting the "total falsification of the history and culture of Azerbaijan".Алиев В. "Кампанией вокруг хачкаров армяне хотят отвлечь внимание мира от агрессии Армении против Азербайджана"/В. Алиев // Наш век, 2006.-5-11 мая, N N18.-С.6 Several appeals were filed by both Armenian and international organizations, condemning the Azerbaijani government and calling on it to desist from such activity. In 2006, Azerbaijan barred
European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the Legislature, legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven Institutions of the European Union, institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and in ...
members from investigating the claims, charging them with a "biased and hysterical approach" to the issue and stating that it would only accept a delegation if it visited Armenian-occupied territory as well. In the spring of 2006, a journalist from the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting The Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) is an independent nonprofit organization that claims to train and provide publishing opportunities for professional and citizen journalists. History IWPR was founded in 1991 under the name Yugofax. ...
who visited the area reported that no visible traces of the cemetery remained. In the same year, photographs taken from Iran showed that the cemetery site had been turned into a military
shooting range A shooting range, firing range, gun range or shooting ground is a specialized facility, venue or field designed specifically for firearm usage qualifications, training, practice or competitions. Some shooting ranges are operated by military ...
. The destruction of the cemetery has been widely described by Armenian sources, and some non-Armenian sources, as an act of " cultural genocide." In Azerbaijan, the
Armenian genocide The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through t ...
is officially denied and is considered a hoax. According to the state ideology of Azerbaijan, a genocide of Azerbaijanis, carried out by Armenians and Russians, took place starting from 1813. Mahmudov has claimed that Armenians first appeared in Karabakh in 1828.Махмудов Я.М. Самый опасный вымысел в истории: (Ложь о "Великой Армении" – "идеология" террора, геноцида и захвата чужих земель) // Бакинский рабочий. – 2009:27 января. – N 16. – С. 2–3.
copy
Azerbaijani academics and politicians have claimed that foreign historians falsify the history of Azerbaijan and criticism was directed towards a Russian documentary about the regions of
Karabakh Karabakh ( az, Qarabağ ; hy, Ղարաբաղ, Ġarabaġ ) is a geographic region in present-day southwestern Azerbaijan and eastern Armenia, extending from the highlands of the Lesser Caucasus down to the lowlands between the rivers Kura and ...
and Nakhchivan and the historical Armenian presence in these areas.Day.Az. 02 Мая 2007 8:13br>Как реагировать на затягивание Россией ответов на ноты протеста?
Керимов Р. Молчание Кремля: РФ рассматривает ноту протеста Азербайджана, в МИД АР ждут извинений и исправлений ошибок, а НАНА готова помочь соседу документами/Р. Керимов // Эхо, 2007.-3 мая, N N 77.-С.1.3 According to the institute director of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Yagub Mahmudov, prior to 1918 "there was never an Armenian state in the South Caucasus". According to Mahmudov,
Ilham Aliyev Ilham Heydar oghlu Aliyev ( az, İlham Heydər oğlu Əliyev, ; born 24 December 1961) is the fourth president of Azerbaijan, serving in the post since 31 October 2003. The son and second child of the former Azerbaijani leader Heydar Aliyev, ...
's statement in which he said that "Irevan is our zerbaijan'shistoric land, and we, Azerbaijanis must return to these historic lands", was based "historical facts" and "historical reality". Mahmudov also stated that the claim that Armenian's are the most ancient people in the region is based on propaganda, and said that Armenians are non-natives of the region, having only arrived in the area after Russian victories over Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the 19th century. The institute director also said: "The Azerbaijani soldier should know that the land under the feet of provocative Armenians is Azerbaijani land. The enemy can never defeat Azerbaijanis on Azerbaijani soil. Those who rule the Armenian state today must fundamentally change their political course. The Armenians cannot defeat us by sitting in our historic city of Irevan."


In relation to Iran

Historic falsifications in Azerbaijan, in relation to
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
and its history, are "backed by state and state backed non-governmental organizational bodies", ranging "from elementary school all the way to the highest level of universities". As a result of the two
Russo-Iranian Wars The Russo-Persian Wars or Russo-Iranian Wars were a series of conflicts between 1651 and 1828, concerning Persia (Iran) and the Russian Empire. Russia and Persia fought these wars over disputed governance of territories and countries in the Cau ...
of the 19th century, the border between what is present-day
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
and the Republic of Azerbaijan was formed. Although there had not been a historical
Azerbaijani Azerbaijani may refer to: * Something of, or related to Azerbaijan * Azerbaijanis * Azerbaijani language See also * Azerbaijan (disambiguation) * Azeri (disambiguation) * Azerbaijani cuisine * Culture of Azerbaijan The culture of Azerbaijan ...
state to speak of in history, the demarcation, set at the
Aras river , az, Araz, fa, ارس, tr, Aras The Aras (also known as the Araks, Arax, Araxes, or Araz) is a river in the Caucasus. It rises in eastern Turkey and flows along the borders between Turkey and Armenia, between Turkey and the Nakhchivan excl ...
, left significant numbers of what were later coined "Azerbaijanis" to the north of the Aras river. During the existence of the
Azerbaijan SSR Azerbaijan ( az, Азәрбајҹан, Azərbaycan, italics=no), officially the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (Azerbaijan SSR; az, Азәрбајҹан Совет Сосиалист Республикасы, Azərbaycan Sovet Sosialist R ...
, as a result of Soviet-era historical revionism and myth-building, the notion of a "northern" and "
southern Southern may refer to: Businesses * China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China * Southern Airways, defunct US airline * Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US * Southern Airways Express, M ...
" Azerbaijan was formulated and spread throughout the Soviet Union. During the Soviet nation building campaign, any event, both past and present, that had ever occurred in what is the present-day Azerbaijan Republic and Iranian Azerbaijan were rebranded as phenomenons of "Azerbaijani culture". Any Iranian ruler or poet that had lived in the area was assigned to the newly rebranded identity of the Transcaucasian Turkophones, in other words "Azerbaijanis". According to Michael P. Croissant: "It was charged that the "two Azerbaijans", once united, were separated artificially by a conspiracy between imperial Russia and Iran". This notion based on illegitimate historic revisionism suited Soviet political purposes well (based on "anti-imperialism"), and became the basis for irredentism among
Azerbaijani nationalists Azerbaijani nationalism ( az, Azərbaycan milliyətçiliyi), also referred to as Azerbaijanism ( az, Azərbaycançılıq, link=no), started out as a cultural movement among Azerbaijani intellectuals within the Russian Empire during the second half ...
in the last years of the Soviet Union, shortly prior to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Republic in 1991. In Azerbaijan, periods and aspects of Iranian history are usually claimed as being an "Azerbaijani" product in a distortion of history, and historic Iranian figures, such as the Persian poet
Nizami Ganjavi Nizami Ganjavi ( fa, نظامی گنجوی, lit=Niẓāmī of Ganja, translit=Niẓāmī Ganjavī; c. 1141–1209), Nizami Ganje'i, Nizami, or Nezāmi, whose formal name was ''Jamal ad-Dīn Abū Muḥammad Ilyās ibn-Yūsuf ibn-Zakkī'',Mo'in ...
are called "Azerbaijanis", contrary to universally acknowledged fact. In the Azerbaijan SSR, forgeries such as an alleged "Turkish '' divan''" and falsified verses were published in order to "Turkify" Nizami Ganjavi. Although this type of irredentism was initially the result of the nation building policy of the Soviets, it became an instrument for "biased, pseudo-academic approaches and political speculations" in the nationalistic aspirations of the young Azerbaijan Republic. In the modern Azerbaijan Republic, historiography is written with the aim of retroactively Turkifying many of the peoples and kingdoms that existed prior to the arrival of Turks in the region, including the Iranian
Medes The Medes ( Old Persian: ; Akkadian: , ; Ancient Greek: ; Latin: ) were an ancient Iranian people who spoke the Median language and who inhabited an area known as Media between western and northern Iran. Around the 11th century BC, ...
. According to professor of history George Bournoutian: Bournoutian adds:


North Korea and the Korean War

Since the start of the
Korean War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Korean War , partof = the Cold War and the Korean conflict , image = Korean War Montage 2.png , image_size = 300px , caption = Clockwise from top:{ ...
(1950–1953), the government of
North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...
has consistently denied that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched the attack with which it began the war for the Communist unification of Korea. The historiography of the DPRK maintains that the war was provoked by
South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...
, at the instigation of the United States: "On June 17, Juche 39 950the then U.S. President arry S.Truman sent ohn FosterDulles as his special envoy to South Korea to examine the anti-North war scenario and give an order to start the attack. On June 18, Dulles inspected the 38th parallel and the war preparations of the ' ROK Army' units. That day he told
Syngman Rhee Syngman Rhee (, ; 26 March 1875 – 19 July 1965) was a South Korean politician who served as the first president of South Korea from 1948 to 1960. Rhee was also the first and last president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Ko ...
to start the attack on North Korea with the counter-propaganda that North Korea first 'invaded' the south." Further North Korean pronouncements included the claim that the U.S. needed the peninsula of Korea as "a bridgehead, for invading the Asian continent, and as a strategic base, from which to fight against national-liberation movements and
socialism Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes th ...
, and, ultimately, to attain world supremacy." Likewise, the DPRK denied the war crimes committed by the
Korean People's Army The Korean People's Army (KPA; ) is the military force of North Korea and the armed wing of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK). Under the '' Songun'' policy, it is the central institution of North Korean society. Currently, WPK General S ...
in the course of the war; nonetheless, in the 1951–1952 period, the
Workers' Party of Korea The Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) is the founding and sole ruling party of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea. Founded in 1949 from the merger of the Workers' Party of North Korea and the Workers' Party ...
(WPK) privately admitted to the "excesses" of their earlier campaign against North Korean citizens who had collaborated with the enemy – either actually or allegedly – during the US–South Korean occupation of North Korea. Later, the WPK blamed every wartime atrocity upon the
U.S. Armed Forces The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...
, e.g. the Sinchon Massacre (17 October – 7 December 1950) occurred during the retreat of the DPRK government from Hwanghae Province, in the south-west of North Korea. The campaign against " collaborators" was attributed to political and ideological manipulations by the U.S.; the high-rank leader Pak Chang-ok said that the American enemy had "started to use a new method, namely, it donned a
leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in so ...
garb, which considerably influenced the inexperienced cadres of the Party and government organs." Kathryn Weathersby's ''Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives'' (1993) confirmed that the Korean War was launched by order of
Kim Il-sung Kim Il-sung (; , ; born Kim Song-ju, ; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he ruled from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of ...
(1912–1994); and also refuted the DPRK's allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War. The
Korean Central News Agency The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) is the state news agency of North Korea. The agency portrays the views of the North Korean government for both domestic and foreign consumption. It was established on December 5, 1946 and now features onli ...
dismissed the historical record of Soviet documents as "sheer forgery".


Holocaust denial

Holocaust deniers usually reject the term ''Holocaust denier'' as an inaccurate description of their historical point of view, instead preferring the term ''Holocaust revisionist''; nonetheless,
scholars A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...
prefer "Holocaust denier" to differentiate deniers from legitimate
historical revisionists In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account. It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event or times ...
, whose goal is to accurately analyse historical evidence with established methods.To clarify the terminology of ''denial'' vs. ''revisionism'', see: * "This is the phenomenon of what has come to be known as 'revisionism', 'negationism', or 'Holocaust denial,' whose main characteristic is either an outright rejection of the very veracity of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, or at least a concerted attempt to minimize both its scale and importance ... It is just as crucial, however, to distinguish between the wholly objectionable politics of denial and the fully legitimate scholarly revision of previously accepted conventional interpretations of any historical event, including the Holocaust." Bartov, Omer. ''The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath,'' Routledge, pp. 11–12. Bartov is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at the Watson Institute, and is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on
genocide Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the ...

"Omer Bartov"
, The Watson Institute for International Studies). * "The two leading critical exposés of Holocaust denial in the United States were written by historians
Deborah Lipstadt Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian, best known as author of the books '' Denying the Holocaust'' (1993), ''History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier'' (2005), ''The Eichmann Trial'' (2011), and ...
(1993) and Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2000). These scholars make a distinction between historical revisionism and denial. Revisionism, in their view, entails a refinement of existing knowledge about a historical event, not a denial of the event itself, that comes through the examination of new empirical evidence or a reexamination or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Legitimate historical revisionism acknowledges a "certain body of irrefutable evidence" or a "convergence of evidence" that suggest that an event – like the black plague, American slavery, or the Holocaust – did in fact occur (Lipstadt 1993:21; Shermer & Grobman 200:34). Denial, on the other hand, rejects the entire foundation of historical evidence ..." Ronald J. Berger. ''Fathoming the Holocaust: A Social Problems Approach'', Aldine Transaction, 2002, , p. 154. * "At this time, in the mid-1970s, the specter of Holocaust Denial (masked as "revisionism") had begun to raise its head in Australia ..." Bartrop, Paul R. "A Little More Understanding: The Experience of a Holocaust Educator in Australia" in Samuel Totten, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Paul R Bartrop. ''Teaching about the Holocaust'', Praeger/Greenwood, 2004, p. xix. * " Pierre Vidal-Naquet urges that denial of the Holocaust should not be called 'revisionism' because 'to deny history is not to revise it'. ''Les Assassins de la Memoire. Un Eichmann de papier et autres essays sur le revisionisme'' (The Assassins of Memory – A Paper-Eichmann and Other Essays on Revisionism) 15 (1987)." Cited in Roth, Stephen J. "Denial of the Holocaust as an Issue of Law" in the ''Israel Yearbook on Human Rights'', Volume 23, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, , p. 215. * "This essay describes, from a methodological perspective, some of the inherent flaws in the "revisionist" approach to the history of the Holocaust. It is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to ascribe motives. Rather, it seeks to explain the fundamental error in the "revisionist" approach, as well as why that approach of necessity leaves no other choice. It concludes that "revisionism" is a misnomer because the facts do not accord with the position it puts forward and, more importantly, its methodology reverses the appropriate approach to historical investigation ..."Revisionism" is obliged to deviate from the standard methodology of historical pursuit because it seeks to mold facts to fit a preconceived result, it denies events that have been objectively and empirically proved to have occurred, and because it works backward from the conclusion to the facts, thus necessitating the distortion and manipulation of those facts where they differ from the preordained conclusion (which they almost always do). In short, "revisionism" denies something that demonstrably happened, through methodological dishonesty." McFee, Gordon
"Why 'Revisionism' Isn't"
The Holocaust History Project, 15 May 1999. Retrieved 15 August 2016. * "Crucial to understanding and combating Holocaust denial is a clear distinction between denial and revisionism. One of the more insidious and dangerous aspects of contemporary Holocaust denial, a la Arthur Butz, Bradley Smith and Greg Raven, is the fact that they attempt to present their work as reputable scholarship under the guise of 'historical revisionism.' The term 'revisionist' permeates their publications as descriptive of their motives, orientation and methodology. In fact, Holocaust denial is in no sense 'revisionism,' it is denial ... Contemporary Holocaust deniers are not revisionists – not even neo-revisionists. They are ''Deniers''. Their motivations stem from their neo-nazi political goals and their rampant antisemitism." Austin, Ben S
"Deniers in Revisionists Clothing"
, The Holocaust\Shoah Page,
Middle Tennessee State University Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU or MT) is a public university in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Founded in 1911 as a normal school, the university consists of eight Undergraduate education, undergraduate colleges as well as a college of Postgr ...
. Retrieved 29 March 2007. * "Holocaust denial can be a particularly insidious form of antisemitism precisely because it often tries to disguise itself as something quite different: as genuine scholarly debate (in the pages, for example, of the innocuous-sounding Journal for Historical Review). Holocaust deniers often refer to themselves as 'revisionists', in an attempt to claim legitimacy for their activities. There are, of course, a great many scholars engaged in historical debates about the Holocaust whose work should not be confused with the output of the Holocaust deniers. Debate continues about such subjects as, for example, the extent and nature of ordinary Germans' involvement in and knowledge of the policy of genocide, and the timing of orders given for the extermination of the Jews. However, the valid endeavour of historical revisionism, which involves the re-interpretation of historical knowledge in the light of newly emerging evidence, is a very different task from that of claiming that the essential facts of the Holocaust, and the evidence for those facts, are fabrications.
The nature of Holocaust denial: What is Holocaust denial?
, JPR report No. 3, 2000. Retrieved 16 May 2007.
Historian Alan Berger reports that Holocaust deniers argue in support of a preconceived theory – that the Holocaust either did not occur or was mostly a hoax – by ignoring extensive historical evidence to the contrary. When the author
David Irving David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English author and Holocaust denier who has written on the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. His works include '' The Destruction of Dresden'' (1 ...
Further information of how Irving was discredited as a historian: * "In 1969, after David Irving's support for Rolf Hochhuth, the German playwright who accused Winston Churchill of murdering the Polish wartime leader General Sikorski, The Daily Telegraph issued a memo to all its correspondents. 'It is incorrect,' it said, 'to describe David Irving as a historian. In future we should describe him as an author.'" Ingram, Richard
Irving was the author of his own downfall
''
The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...
'', 25 February 2006. * "It may seem an absurd semantic dispute to deny the appellation of 'historian' to someone who has written two dozen books or more about historical subjects. But if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. Those in the know, indeed, are accustomed to avoid the term altogether when referring to him and use some circumlocution such as 'historical writer' instead. Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own ideological ends in the present. The true historian's primary concern, however, is with the past. That is why, in the end, Irving is not a historian." Irving vs. (1) Lipstadt and (2) Penguin Books
Expert Witness Report
by Richard J. Evans FBA, Professor of Modern History,
University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
, 2000, Chapter 6. * "State prosecutor Michael Klackl said: 'He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history.'" Traynor, Ian
Irving jailed for denying Holocaust
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
'', 21 February 2006. * "One of Britain's most prominent speakers on Muslim issues is today exposed as a supporter of David Irving. ... Bukhari contacted the discredited historian, sentenced this year to three years in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial, after reading his website." Doward, Jamie
"Muslim leader sent funds to Irving"
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
'', 19 November 2006. * "David Irving, the discredited historian and Nazi apologist, was last night starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz." Traynor, Ian
"Irving jailed for denying Holocaust"
''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
'', 21 February 2006. * "Conclusion on meaning 2.15 (vi): that Irving is discredited as a historian." David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt/II. * "DAVID Irving, the discredited revisionist historian and most outspoken British Holocaust denier, has added further fuel to the controversy over his early release from an Austrian jail by recanting his court statement of regret over his views." Crichton, Torcuil. "Holocaust denier reneges on regret", '' The Sunday Herald'', 24 December 2006. * "Discredited British author David Irving spoke in front of some 250 people at a small theatre on Szabadság tér last Monday." Hodgson, Robert
"Holocaust denier David Irving draws a friendly crowd in Budapest"
''The Budapest Times'', 19 March 2007. * "An account of the 2000–2001 libel trial in the high court of the now discredited historian David Irving, which formed the backdrop for his recent conviction in Vienna for denying the Holocaust.
Program Details – David Irving: The London Trial 2006-02-26 17:00:00
''
BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC's ...
.'' * "Yet Irving, a discredited right-wing historian, was described by a High Court judge after a long libel trial as a racist anti-semite who denied the Holocaust." Edwards, Rob. "Anti-green activist in links with Nazi writer; Revealed: campaigner", '' The Sunday Herald'', 5 May 2002. * "'The sentence against Irving confirms that he and his views are discredited, but as a general rule I don't think that this is the way this should be dealt with,' said Antony Lerman, director of the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research. 'It is better to combat denial by education and using good speech to drive out bad speech.'" Gruber, Ruth Ellen
"Jail sentence for Holocaust denier spurs debate on free speech"
'' J. The Jewish News of Northern California'', 24 February 2006. * "Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of The Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. She is the author of two books about the Holocaust. Her book ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory'' led to the 2000 court case in which she defeated and discredited Holocaust denier David Irving.
Understanding Auschwitz Today
Task of Justice & Danger of Holocaust Deniers, ''
Public Broadcasting Service The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educa ...
''. * "After the discredited British historian David Irving was sentenced to a three-year jail term in Austria as a penalty for denying the Holocaust, the liberal conscience of western Europe has squirmed and agonised." Glover, Gillian
"Irving gets just what he wanted – his name in the headlines"
''
The Scotsman ''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its pare ...
'', 23 February 2006. * "... is a disciple of discredited historian and Holocaust denier David Irving." Horowitz, David. ''The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America'', Regnery Publishing, 2006, , p. 175. * "If the case for competence applies to those who lack specialist knowledge, it applies even further to those who have been discredited as incompetent. For example, why ought we include David Irving in a debate aiming to establish the truth about the Holocaust, after a court has found that he manipulates and misinterprets history?" Long, Graham. ''Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism'', Imprint Academic, 2004, , p. 80. * "Ironically, Julius is also a celebrated solicitor famous for his defence of Schuchard's colleague, Deborah Lipstadt, against the suit for of libel brought by the discredited historian David Irving brought when Lipstadt accused him of denying the Holocaust.
"T S Eliot's anti-Semitism hotly debated as scholars argue over new evidence"
,
University of York The University of York (abbreviated as or ''York'' for post-nominals) is a collegiate research university, located in the city of York, England. Established in 1963, the university has expanded to more than thirty departments and centres, co ...
, Communications Office, 5 February 2003. * "Irving, a discredited historian, has insisted that Jews at Auschwitz were not gassed." "Irving vows to continue denial", Breaking News, ''
Jewish Telegraphic Agency The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) is an international news agency and wire service, founded in 1917, serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world as well as non-Jewish press, with about 70 syndication clients listed on its we ...
'', 7 February 2007. * "David Irving, the discredited historian and Nazi apologist, was on Monday night starting a three-year prison sentence in Vienna for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
"Historian jailed for denying Holocaust"
, ''
Mail & Guardian The ''Mail & Guardian'' is a South African weekly newspaper and website, published by M&G Media in Johannesburg, South Africa. It focuses on political analysis, investigative reporting, Southern African news, local arts, music and popular cult ...
'', 21 February 2006. * "Irving, a discredited historian, has insisted that Jews at Auschwitz were not gassed.
"Irving Vows To Continue Denial"
, ''
The Jewish Week ''The Jewish Week'' is a weekly independent community newspaper targeted towards the Jewish community of the metropolitan New York City area. ''The Jewish Week'' covers news relating to the Jewish community in NYC. In March 2016, ''The Jewish W ...
'', 29 December 2006. * "The two best-known present-day Holocaust deniers are the discredited historian David Irving, jailed last year in Austria for the offence, and the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wants Israel wiped off the map." Wills, Clair. " Ben Kiely and the 'Holocaust denial'", ''
Irish Independent The ''Irish Independent'' is an Irish daily newspaper and online publication which is owned by Independent News & Media (INM), a subsidiary of Mediahuis. The newspaper version often includes glossy magazines. Traditionally a broadsheet new ...
'', 10 March 2007. * " rvingclaimed that Lipstadt's book accuses him of falsifying historical facts to support his theory that the Holocaust never happened. This of course discredited his reputation as a historian. ... On 11 April, High Court judge Charles Gray ruled against Irving, concluding that he qualified as a Holocaust denier and anti-Semite, and that as such he distorted history to defend his hero, Adolf Hitler." Wyden, Peter. ''The Hitler Virus: the Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler'', Arcade Publishing, 2001, , p. 164. * "Now that holocaust denier David Irving has been discredited, what is the future of history?" Kustow, Michael
"History after Irving"
, '' Red Pepper'', June 2000. * "In Britain, which does not have a Holocaust denial law, Irving had already been thoroughly discredited when he unsuccessfully sued historian Deborah Lipstadt in 1998 for describing him as a Holocaust denier." Callamard, Agnès. "Debate: can we say what we want?", ''
Le Monde diplomatique ''Le Monde diplomatique'' (meaning "The Diplomatic World" in French) is a French monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs. The publication is owned by Le Monde diplomatique SA, a subsidiary com ...
'', April 2007. * "Holocaust denier and discredited British historian David Irving, for example, asserts. ... that Auschwitz gas chambers were constructed after World War II.
"Hate-Group Web Sites Target Children, Teens"
''Psychiatric News'',
American Psychiatric Association The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organization in the world. It has more than 37,000 members are invo ...
, 2 February 2001. * "Holocaust denier: An Austrian court hears discredited British historian David Irving's appeal against his jail sentence for denying the Nazi genocide of the Jews."
"The world this week"
BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadc ...
, 20 December 2006. * "Discredited British historian David Irving began serving three years in an Austrian prison yesterday for denying the Holocaust, a crime in the country where Hitler was born." Schofield, Matthew
"Controversial Nazi apologist backs down, but still jailed for three years"
''
The Age ''The Age'' is a daily newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, that has been published since 1854. Owned and published by Nine Entertainment, ''The Age'' primarily serves Victoria (Australia), Victoria, but copies also sell in Tasmania, the Austral ...
'', 22 February 2006.
lost his English libel case against
Deborah Lipstadt Deborah Esther Lipstadt (born March 18, 1947) is an American historian, best known as author of the books '' Denying the Holocaust'' (1993), ''History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier'' (2005), ''The Eichmann Trial'' (2011), and ...
, and her publisher,
Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Justice Charles Gray, concluded that "Irving has, for his own ideological reasons, persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that, for the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." On 20 February 2006, Irving was found guilty, and sentenced to three years imprisonment for Holocaust denial, under Austria's 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalizing the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes". Besides Austria, eleven other countries – including Belgium, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Switzerland – have criminalized Holocaust denial as punishable with imprisonment.Laws against denying the Holocaust: * Philip Johnston
Britons face extradition (to Germany) for 'thought crime' on net
in ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...
'', 18 February 2003 * Brendan O'Neil
"Irving? Let the guy go home"
rom Austria BBC 4 January 2006 * Malte Herwig
The Swastika Wielding Provocateur
' in ''
Der Spiegel ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' 16 January 2006 *
14 July 1990 Act prohibiting racist, antisemitic and xenophobic acts – ''loi Gayssot''
* *

by the
Stephen Roth Institute The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism is a research institute at Tel Aviv University in Israel. It is a resource for information, provides a forum for academic discussion, and fosters research on issues ...
for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism * Philip Johnston,
Blair's pledge on Holocaust denial law abandoned
in ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...
'', 21 January 2000 and Lithuania.


1989 Tiananmen Square protests

The
1989 Tiananmen Square protests The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...
were a series of pro-democracy demonstrations against the Chinese Communist Party that were put down violently on 4 June 1989, by the Government of China, Chinese government via the People's Liberation Army, resulting in estimated casualties of over 10,000 deaths and 40,000 injured, obtained via later declassified documents.


North Macedonia

According to Eugene N. Borza, the Macedonians (ethnic group), Macedonians are in search of their past to legitimize their unsure present, in the Breakup of Yugoslavia, disorder of the History of the Balkans#20th century, Balkan politics. Ivaylo Dichev claims that the Macedonian historiography has the impossible task of filling the huge gaps between the ancient kingdom of Macedon, that collapsed in 2nd century BC, the 10th–11th century state of the Cometopuls, and the Yugoslav Macedonia established in the middle of the 20th century. According to Ulf Brunnbauer, modern Macedonian historiography is highly politicized, because the Macedonian nation-building process is still in development. The recent nation-building project imposes the idea of a "Macedonian nation" with unbroken continuity from the antiquity (Ancient Macedonians) to the modern times, which has been criticized by some domestic and foreign scholars for ahistorically projecting modern ethnic distinctions into the past. In this way generations of students were educated in pseudohistory.


In textbooks


Japan

The Japanese history textbook controversies, history textbook controversy centres upon the secondary school history textbook ''Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho'' ("New History Textbook") said to whitewash (censorship), minimize the nature of Japanese militarism in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), in annexing Korea in 1910, in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and in the Pacific War, Pacific Theater of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
(1941–45). The conservative Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform commissioned the ''Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho'' textbook with the purpose of traditional national and international view of that Japanese historical period. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Ministry of Education vets all history textbooks, especially those containing references to imperialist atrocities due to a special provision in the textbook examination rules to avoid inflaming controversy with neighboring countries; however, the ''Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho'' de-emphasizes aggressive Japanese Imperial wartime behaviour and the matter of Chinese and Korean
comfort women Comfort women or comfort girls were women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied countries and territories before and during World War II. The term "comfort women" is a translation of the Japanese '' ian ...
. When it comes to the Nanking Massacre, Nanking massacre, the textbook only refers to it as the Nanking Incident, mentioning there were civilian casualties without delving into specifics, and mentioning it again in relation to the Tokyo tribunal, stating that there are multiple opinions about the topic with controversies continuing to this day (see Nanking Massacre denial, Nanking massacre denial). In 2007, the Ministry of Education attempted to revise textbooks regarding the Battle of Okinawa, lessening the involvement of the Imperial Japanese Army in Okinawan civilian mass suicides.


Pakistan

Allegations of historical revisionism have been made regarding Pakistani textbooks in that they are laced with Indophobic, Hindu-hating and Islamist bias. Pakistan's use of officially published textbooks has been criticized for using schools to more subtly foster religious extremism, whitewashing Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent and promoting "expansive pan-Islamic imaginings" that "detect the beginnings of Pakistan in the birth of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula, Arabian peninsula". Since 2001, the Pakistani government has stated that curriculum reforms have been underway by the Ministry of Education (Pakistan), Ministry of Education.


South Korea

12 October 2015, South Korea's government has announced controversial plans to control the history textbooks used in secondary schools despite oppositional concerns of people and academics that the decision is made to glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa). Section and the authoritarian dictatorships in South Korea during 1960s–1980s.The Ministry of Education (South Korea), Ministry of Education announced that it would put the secondary-school history textbook under state control; "This was an inevitable choice in order to straighten out historical errors and end the social dispute caused by ideological bias in the textbooks," Hwang Woo-yea, education minister said on 12 October 2015. According to the government's plan, the current history textbooks of South Korea will be replaced by a single textbook written by a panel of government-appointed historians and the new series of publications would be issued under the title ''The Correct Textbook of History'' and are to be issued to the public and private primary and secondary schools in 2017 onwards. The move has sparked fierce criticism from academics who argue that the system can be used to distort the history and glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa) and of the authoritarian dictatorships. Moreover, 466 organizations including Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union formed History Act Network in solidarity and have staged protests: "The government's decision allows the state too much control and power and, therefore, it is against political neutrality that is certainly the fundamental principle of education." Many South Korean historians condemned Kyohaksa for their text glorifying those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa) and the authoritarian dictatorship with a far-right political perspective. On the other hand, New Right supporters welcomed the textbook, saying that "the new textbook finally describes historical truths contrary to the history textbooks published by left-wing publishers", and the textbook issue became intensified as a case of ideological conflict. In History of Korea, Korean history, the history textbook was once put under state control during the authoritarian regime under Park Chung-hee (1963–1979), who is a father of Park Geun-hye, former President of South Korea, and was used as a means to keep the Fourth Republic of Korea, Yushin Regime, also known as the Yushin Dictatorship; however, there had been continuous criticisms about the system especially from the 1980s when Korea experienced a June Democratic Struggle, dramatic democratic development. In 2003, reformation of textbook began when the textbooks on Korean modern and contemporary history were published though the Textbook Screening System, which allows textbooks to be published not by a single government body but by many different companies, for the first time.


Turkey

Education in Turkey is centralized, and its policy, administration, and content are each determined by the Turkish government. Textbooks taught in schools are either prepared directly by the Ministry of National Education (Turkey), Ministry of National Education (MEB) or must be approved by its Instruction and Education Board. In practice, this means that the Turkish government is directly responsible for what textbooks are taught in schools across Turkey.Akcam: Textbooks and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey: Heading Towards 2015
''Armenian Weekly''
In 2014, Taner Akçam, writing for the ''Armenian Weekly'', discussed 2014–2015 Turkish elementary and middle school textbooks that the MEB had made available on the internet. He found that Turkish history textbooks describe Armenians as people "who are incited by foreigners, who aim to break apart the state and the country, and who murdered Turks and Muslims." The Armenian genocide is referred to as the "Armenian matter", and is described as a lie perpetrated to further the perceived hidden agenda of Armenians. Recognition of the Armenian genocide is defined as the "biggest threat to Turkish national security". Akçam summarized one textbook that claims the Armenians had sided with the Russians during the war. The 1909 Adana massacre, in which as many as 20,000–30,000 Armenians were massacred, is identified as "The Rebellion of Armenians of Adana". According to the book, the Armenian Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, Hnchak and Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Dashnak organizations instituted rebellions in many parts of Anatolia, and "didn't hesitate to kill Armenians who would not join them," issuing instructions that "if you want to survive you have to kill your neighbor first." Claims highlighted by Akçam: "[The Armenians murdered] many people living in villages, even children, by attacking Turkish villages, which had become defenseless because all the Turkish men were fighting on the war fronts. ... They stabbed the Ottoman forces in the back. They created obstacles for the operations of the Ottoman units by cutting off their supply routes and destroying bridges and roads. ... They spied for Russia and by rebelling in the cities where they were located, they eased the way for the Russian invasion. ... Since the Armenians who engaged in massacres in collaboration with the Russians created a dangerous situation, this law required the migration of [Armenian people] from the towns they were living in to Syria, a safe Ottoman territory. ... Despite being in the midst of war, the Ottoman state took precautions and measures when it came to the Armenians who were migrating. Their tax payments were postponed, they were permitted to take any personal property they wished, government officials were assigned to ensure that they were protected from attacks during the journey and that their needs were met, police stations were established to ensure that their lives and properties were secure." Similar revisionist claims found in other textbooks by Akçam included that Armenian "back-stabbing" was the reason the Ottomans lost the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 (similar to the post-War German stab-in-the-back myth), that the Hamidian massacres never happened, that the Armenians were armed by the Russians during late World War I to fight the Ottomans (in reality they had already been nearly annihilated from the area by this point), that Armenians killed 600,000 Turks during said war, that the deportation were to save Armenians from other violent Armenian gangs, and that deported Armenians were later allowed to retrieve their possessions and return to Turkey unharmed. As of 2015, Turkish textbooks continue to refer to Armenians as "traitors," deny the genocide, and assert that the Ottoman Turks "took necessary measures to counter Armenian separatism". Students are taught that Armenians were forcibly relocated to defend Turkish nationals from attacks, and Armenians are described as "dishonorable and treacherous".


Yugoslavia

Throughout the post war era, though Tito denounced nationalist sentiments in historiography, those trends continued with Croat and Serbian academics at times accusing each other of misrepresenting each other's histories, especially in relation to the Croat-Nazi alliance. Communist historiography was challenged in the 1980s and a rehabilitation of Serbian nationalism by Serbian historians began. Historians and other members of the intelligentsia belonging to the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts ( la, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Serbica, sr-Cyr, Српска академија наука и уметности, САНУ, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, SANU) is a national academy and the ...
(SANU) and the Association of Writers of Serbia, Writers Association played a significant role in the explanation of the new historical narrative. The process of writing a "new Serbian history" paralleled alongside the emerging ethno-nationalist mobilization of Serbs with the objective of reorganizing the Yugoslav federation. Using ideas and concepts from Holocaust historiography, Serbian historians alongside church leaders applied it to World War Two Yugoslavia and equated the Serbs with Jews and Croats with Nazi Germans. Chetniks along with the Ustashe were vilified by Tito era historiography within Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, Serbian historians initiated the process of re-examining the narrative of how World War Two was told in Yugoslavia which was accompanied by the rehabilitation of Četnik leader Draža Mihailović. Monographs relating to Mihailović and the Četnik movement were produced by some younger historians who were ideologically close to it towards the end of the 1990s. Being preoccupied with the era, Serbian historians have looked to vindicate the history of the Chetniks by portraying them as righteous freedom fighters battling the Nazis while removing from history books the ambiguous alliances with the Italians and Germans. Whereas the crimes committed by Chetniks against Croats and Muslims in Serbian historiography are overall "cloaked in silence". During the Milošević era, Serbian history was falsified to obscure the role Serbian collaborators Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić played in cleansing History of the Jews in Serbia, Serbia's Jewish community, killing them in the country or deporting them to Eastern European concentration camps. In the 1990s following a massive Western media coverage of the Yugoslav Wars, there was a rise of the publications considering the matter on historical revisionism of former Yugoslavia. One of the most prominent authors on the field of historical revisionism in the 1990s considering the newly emerged republics is Noel Malcolm and his works ''Bosnia: A Short History (1994)'' and ''Kosovo: A Short History (1998)'', that have seen a robust debate among historians following their release; following the release of the latter, the merits of the book were the subject of an extended debate in ''Foreign Affairs''. Critics said that the book was "marred by his sympathies for its ethnic Albanian separatists, anti-Serbian bias, and illusions about the Balkans". In late 1999, Thomas Emmert of the history faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota reviewed the book in ''Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans Online'' and while praising aspects of the book also asserted that it was "shaped by the author's overriding determination to challenge Serbian myths", that Malcolm was "partisan", and also complained that the book made a "transparent attempt to prove that the main Serbian myths are false". In 2006, a study by Frederick Anscombe looked at issues surrounding scholarship on Kosovo such as Noel Malcolm's work ''Kosovo: A Short History''. Anscombe noted that Malcolm offered a "a detailed critique of the competing versions of Kosovo's history" and that his work marked a "remarkable reversal" of previous acceptance by Western historians of the "Serbian account" regarding the migration of the Serbs (1690) from Kosovo.. "Noel Malcolm, who offers a detailed critique of the competing versions of Kosovo's history... Here is a remarkable reversal, as Malcolm, like other Western historians, had previously accepted the Serbian account." Malcolm has been criticized for being "anti-Serbian" and selective like the Serbs with the sources, while other more restrained critics note that "his arguments are unconvincing". Anscombe noted that Malcolm, like Serbian and Yugoslav historians who have ignored his conclusions sideline and are unwilling to consider indigenous evidence such as that from the Ottoman archive when composing national history.. "Malcolm is criticized for being anti-Serbian, and for using his sources as selectively as the Serbs, though the more restrained of his critics only suggest that his arguments are unconvincing. Most of the documents he relies on were written by enemies of the Ottoman Empire, or by officials with limited experience of the Ottoman Balkans... Malcolm, like the historians of Serbia and Yugoslavia who ignore his findings, overlooks the most valuable indigenous evidence. Unwillingness to consider Ottoman evidence when constructing national history is exemplified by the Serbian historians..."


French law recognizing colonialism's positive value

On 23 February 2005, the Union for a Popular Movement conservative majority at the French National Assembly voted a law compelling history textbooks and teachers to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in French North Africa, North Africa". It was criticized by historians and teachers, among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who refused to recognize the French Parliament's right to influence the way history is written (despite the French
Holocaust denial Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements: ...
laws, see ''Loi Gayssot''). That law was also challenged by left-wing parties and the former French colonial empires, French colonies; critics argued that the law was tantamount to refusing to acknowledge the racism inherent to French colonialism, and that the law proper is a form of historical revisionism.In retaliation against the law, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika refused to sign a prepared "friendly treaty" with France. On 26 June 2005, Bouteflika declared that the law "approached mental blindness, negationism and revisionism". In Martinique, Aimé Césaire, author of the ''Négritude'' literary movement, refused to receive UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent president of France.


Marcos martial law negationism in the Philippines

In the Philippines, the biggest examples of historical negationism are linked to the Marcos family dynasty, usually Imelda Marcos,
Bongbong Marcos Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr. ( , , ; born September 13, 1957), commonly referred to by the initials PBBM or BBM, is a Filipino politician who is the 17th and current president of the Philippines. He previously served as a sen ...
, and Imee Marcos specifically. They have been accused of denying or trivializing the human rights violations during martial law and the plunder of the Philippines' coffers while Ferdinand Marcos was president.


Denial of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula

A spin-off of the vision of history espoused by the "inclusive Spanish nationalism" built in opposition to the National Catholicism, National-Catholic brand of Spanish nationalism, it was first coined by Ignacio Olagüe (a dilettante historian connected to the early Spanish fascism) particularly in the former's 1974 work ''La revolución islámica en Occidente'' ("The Islamic revolution in the West"). The negationist postulates of Olagüe were later adopted by certain sectors within Andalusian nationalism. These ideas were resurrected in the early 21st century by the Arabist Emilio González Ferrín.


Australia

During the British colonization of Australia, the Indigenous Australian population drastically plummeted during the Australian frontier wars. Under the ''terra nullius'' doctrine, aboriginal people were regarded as lacking any concept of property rights and thus no treaty was ever signed to negotiate land from the native inhabitants. List of massacres of Indigenous Australians, Massacres and Mass poisonings of Aboriginal Australians, mass poisonings have also been carried out against indigenous people during colonization as well. In addition, indigenous children were removed from their families in an assimilation project designed to absorb the native population into white society in an attempt to "breed out the color" in what's known as the Stolen Generations. After the release of the ''Bringing Them Home'' report in 1997, the John Howard administration denied that the Stolen Generations were committed with genocidal intent and refused to apologize for the program. Right-wing historians such as Keith Windschuttle have written books claiming that genocide against Indigenous Australians never happened, arguing that the mortality rates among aboriginal people during colonization were largely due to disease and that the Stolen Generations were actually committed with the intent to protect children from neglect in abusive families. Conservative historians have also claimed that the idea of a genocide against aboriginal people is a myth deliberately fabricated by orthodox historians in support of a "black armband" view of history conveying the message of white guilt.


Ramifications and judicature

Some countries have criminalized historical revisionism of historic events such as the
Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
. The Council of Europe defines it as the "denial, gross minimisation, approval or genocide justification, justification of genocide or
crimes against humanity Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
" (article 6, ''Additional Protocol to the Convention on cybercrime'').


International law

Some council-member states proposed an additional protocol to the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, addressing materials and "acts of racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer networks"; it was negotiated from late 2001 to early 2002, and, on 7 November 2002, the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers adopted the protocol's final text titled ''Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cyber-crime, Concerning the Criminalisation of Acts of a Racist and Xenophobic Nature Committed through Computer Systems'', ("Protocol"). It opened on 28 January 2003, and became current on 1 March 2006; as of 30 November 2011, 20 States have signed and ratified the Protocol, and 15 others have signed, but not yet ratified it (including Canada and South Africa). The Protocol requires participant States to criminalize the dissemination of racist and xenophobic material, and of racist and xenophobic threats and insults through computer networks, such as the Internet.Frequently asked questions and answers Council of Europe Convention on cyber-crime
by the United States Department of Justice
Article 6, Section 1 of the Protocol specifically covers Holocaust Denial, and other genocides recognized as such by international courts, established since 1945, by relevant international legal instruments. Section 2 of Article 6 allows a Party to the Protocol, at their discretion, only to prosecute the violator if the crime is committed with the intent to incite hatred or discrimination or violence; or to use a reservation, by allowing a Party not to apply Article 6 – either partly or entirely. The Council of Europe's ''Explanatory Report'' of the Protocol says that the "European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that the denial or revision of 'clearly established historical facts – such as the Holocaust  –  ... would be removed from the protection of Article 10 by Article 17' of the European Convention on Human Rights" (see the ''Lehideux and Isorni v. France, Lehideux and Isorni'' judgement of 23 September 1998); Two of the English-speaking states in Europe, Ireland and the United Kingdom, have not signed the additional protocol, (the third, Malta, signed on 28 January 2003, but has not yet ratified it). On 8 July 2005 Canada became the only non-European state to sign the convention. They were joined by South Africa in April 2008. The United States government does not believe that the final version of the Protocol is consistent with the United States' First Amendment Constitutional rights and has informed the Council of Europe that the United States will not become a Party to the protocol.APCoc Treaty open for signature by the States which have signed the Treaty ETS 185.
on the Council of Europe web site


Domestic law

There are domestic laws against negationism and hate speech (which may encompass negationism) in several countries, including: * Austria (Article I §3 Verbotsgesetz 1947 with its 1992 updates and added paragraph §3h). * Belgium (Belgian Holocaust denial law). * Czech Republic. * France (Gayssot Act). * Germany (§130(3) of the penal code).Text of §130(3) of the German penal code
(in German).
* Hungary. * Israel. * Lithuania. * Luxembourg. * Poland (Article 55 of the law establishing the Institute of National Remembrance 1998). * Portugal. * Romania. * Slovakia. * Switzerland (Article 261bis of the Penal Code). Additionally, the Netherlands considers denying the Holocaust as a hate crime – which is a punishable offence.The Laws Banning Holocaust Denial
Genocide Prevention Now. Retrieved 28 November 2011. pp. 1–9
Wider use of domestic laws include the 1990 French ''loi Gayssot, Gayssot Act'' that prohibits any "racist, anti-Semitic or xenophobia, xenophobic" speech, and the Czech Republic and Ukraine have criminalized the denial and the minimization of Crimes against humanity under communist regimes, Communist-era crimes.


In fiction

In the novel ''
Nineteen Eighty-Four ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' (also stylised as ''1984'') is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and fina ...
'' (1949) by
George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalit ...
, the government of Oceania (fiction), Oceania continually revises historical records to concord with the contemporary political explanations of The Party. When Oceania is at war with Nations of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Eurasia, the public records (newspapers, cinema, television) indicate that Oceania has been always at war with Eurasia; yet, when Eurasia and Oceania are no longer fighting each other, the historical records are subjected to negationism; thus, the populace are mind control, brainwashed to believe that Oceania and Eurasia always have been allies against Eastasia. The protagonist of the story, Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four), Winston Smith, is an editor in the Ministry of Truth, responsible for effecting the continual historical revisionism that will negate the contradictions of the past upon the contemporary world of Oceania. To cope with the psychological stresses of life during wartime, Smith begins a diary, in which he observes that "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future", and so illustrates the principal, ideological purpose of historical negationism. Franz Kurowski was an extremely prolific right-wing German writer who dedicated his entire career to the production of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, Nazi military propaganda, followed by post-war military pulp fiction and revisionist histories of
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, Clean Wehrmacht, claiming the humane behaviour and innocence of war crimes of the ''Wehrmacht'', glorifying war as a desirable state, while fabricating eyewitness reports of atrocities allegedly committed by the Allies, especially Bomber Command and the air raids on Cologne and Dresden as a planned genocide of the civilian population.*


See also

* Academic integrity * Alternative facts * Ash heap of history * Big lie * Black legend * Cognitive dissonance * ''Damnatio memoriae'' * Doublethink * Dunning School (United States) * History wars, History wars (Australia) * History wars (Canada) * Information warfare * Memory hole * National memory * Selective omission – biases to taboo some elements of a collective memory


Cases of denialism

* 1776 Commission * Anti-Katyn * Denial of the Holodomor * Genocide denial – lists a number of particular cases * North–South divide in Taiwan * Temple denial * Waffen-SS in popular culture * White Legend


Notes


References


Sources

* * * *


Further reading

* * Arun Shourie, Shourie, Arun. 2014. Eminent historians: their technology, their line, their fraud. HarperCollins. . * Arun Shourie, Sita Ram Goel, Harsh Narain, J. Dubashi & Ram Swarup. Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them Vol. I, (A Preliminary Survey) (1990) .


External links


Untruth in the Classroom, 1994

Why "revisionism" isn't

Mad Revisionist: A parody site on historical revisionism


presented at the trial "Irving vs. (1) Lipstadt and (2) Penguin Books"

– a satirical look at historical revisionism
43-page long academic paper about revisionism concerning the Amerindians
by ''The Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law'' Vol. 18, No. 3
Nizkor Project
Web site answering Holocaust deniers {{authority control Historical negationism, Pseudohistory