Genocide denial

Genocide denial occurs when an act of genocide, that is commonly understood to have happened, is met with attempts to deny the occurrence and minimize the scale or death toll. The most well-known type is Holocaust denial, but its definition can extend to any genocide that has been minimized or met with excessive skepticism.

Where there is near universal agreement that a genocide occurred, genocide denial is usually considered a form of illegitimate historical revisionism. However, in circumstances where the event in dispute is not seen to constitute genocide by the majority of scholars, the use of the term may be an ad hominem by those who argue that a genocide occurred.

The extremely serious nature of the crime of genocide, along with the terrible reputation it creates, and potential repercussions that may come against a nation as a result of committing it, ensures that whenever genocide is charged, there will be parties that attempt to avoid or divert blame. However as Larissa van den Herik has pointed out there is a gap in international law that encourages the use of the charge of genocide when other charges might be more appropriate "The only way for Bosnia to go to the ICJ was to allege genocide. There is no Crimes against Humanity Convention providing for jurisdiction for the ICJ"

The European Union's executive Commission proposed a European Union wide anti-racism law in 2001, which included an offense of genocide denial, but European Union states failed to agree on the balance between prohibiting racism and freedom of expression. After six years of wrangling a watered down compromise was reached in 2007 giving states freedom to implement the legislation as they saw fit.

Techniques used by illegitimate historical revisionists

The distinction between respectable academic historians and those of illegitimate historical revisionists rests on the techniques used to write such histories. Accuracy and revision are central to historical scholarship. As in any academic discipline, historians' papers are submitted to peer review. Instead of submitting their work to the challenges of peer review, illegitimate revisionists rewrite history to support an agenda, often political, using any number of techniques and logical fallacies to obtain their results.

Richard Evans describes the difference thus:

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 maximise the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures as impartially as possible in order to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages in order to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not wilfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events for which there is no historical evidence in order to make their arguments more plausible

— Richard J. Evans

Writing on genocide denial in general

Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch, lists denial as the final stage of genocide development:

Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims.

George Orwell writes in 'Notes on Nationalism' that

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Israel Charney, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Israel, describes genocide denial by putting it into the following categories:

1. Innocence-and-Self-Righteousness

The respondents claim that they only intend to ascertain the truth. Moreover, they do not believe that human beings could have been so evil as the descriptions of the genocide imply. Furthermore, even if many deaths took place a long time ago, it is important to put them aside now and forgive and forget.

2. Scientificism in the service of confusion

The position taken is seemingly an innocent one that we do not know enough to know what the facts of history were, and rather than condemning anyone we should await the ultimate decision of research. This is a manipulative misuse of the valued principle in science that facts must be proven before they are accepted in order to obfuscate facts that are indeed known, and to confuse the minds of fair-minded people who do not want to fall prey to myths and propaganda. The very purpose of science, which is to know, is invoked in order to justify a form of know-nothingness.

3. Practicality, pragmatism and realpolitik

Here the claim is made that dealing with ancient history is impractical, it will not bring peace to the world in which we live today. One must be realistic and live through realpolitik.

4. Idea linkage distortion and time-sequence confusion

This is a dishonest linkage of different ideas, often out of time sequence, to excuse denials of the facts. Present needs, whether justified or not, are taken as a reasonable basis for censoring or changing the record of past history.

5. Indirection, definitionalism, and maddening

These are responses which avoid the issue by failing to reply, or no less by going off on tangents about trivial details that avoid the essential issue whether genocide took place. The avoidance can also be done in a seductive manner of acknowledging that the issue should be discussed, but then it never is.

Notable genocide denials by individuals and non government organisations

• Darko Trifunovic is an author of the Report about Case Srebrenica, which was commissioned by the Republic of Srpska entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The report denied that there had been a genocide and accused the International Committee of the Red Cross of having "fabricated" its findings on the killings. After the report was published on 3 September 2002, it was provoke outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkans and international figures, individuals and organizations. The British Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane condemned the report as "an insult to the memory of those who died. The authors of this report belong in the same category as those who deny the Holocaust took place".

• David Campbell has written of the now defunct British magazine Living Marxism that "LM’s intentions are clear from the way they have sought to publicize accounts of contemporary atrocities which suggest they were certainly not genocidal (as in the case of Rwanda), and perhaps did not even occur (as in the case of the murder of nearly 8,000 at Srebrenica)." Chris McGreal writing in the Guardian Newspaper on 20 March 2000, stated that Fiona Fox writing under a pseudonym had contributed an article to Living Marxism which was part of a campaign by Living Marxism that denied that the event which occurred in Rwanda was a genocide.

• In February 2006 David Irving was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial, he served 13 months in prison before being released on probation.
• Bernard Lewis was fined one-franc by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article.
• Scott Jaschik has stated that Justin McCarthy, is one of two scholars "most active on promoting the view that no [Armenian] genocide took place". He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the genocide.
• Shimon Peres, President of Israel, has been quoted as having said: "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide." In response to criticism of the comments, the Israeli Foreign Ministry later clarified, "The minister absolutely did not say, as the Turkish news agency alleged, 'What the Armenians underwent was a tragedy, not a genocide.'"
• Samuel Weems wrote an anti-Armenian book entitled "Armenia, a big deception. A mystery of Christian-terrorist state". In it he asserts that the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire occurred during a civil war and not in a genocide.

Notable genocide denials by governments

• The government of the Republic of Turkey has long disputed that the mass killings of Armenians was a genocide. This was exemplified by their objections in April 2007 to the wording in a United Nations exhibition, entitled "Lessons from Rwanda", about the 1994 Rwanda genocide, that forced a delay to the opening of the exhibition. The sentence disputed by Turkey was "Following World War 1, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes". As a diplomatic compromise, the wording was changed to "In 1933, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, urged the League of Nations to recognize mass atrocities against a particular group as an international crime. He cited mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman empire in World War I and other mass killings in history. He was ignored." The exhibition opened on 1 May 2007 three weeks later than planned.
• The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 that affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and some densely populated regions of Russia, has a special connotation in Ukraine where it is called the Holodomor. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and other parts of Russia, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result an estimated seven million died Soviet-wide, including five million in the Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere. Ukraine is attempting to have the Holodomor recognised as an act of genocide. This move is opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament. Moscow recognises that the famine took place, but refuses to class it as an ethnic genocide.

See also

• Genocides in history