Negationism

 

History has always been viewed as a social resource that contributes to shaping a nation’s identity, culture, and the public memory.

It is for this very reason that our nation’s history is under siege. Political activists and dissident academic historians are attempting to manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. They tear at the very fabric of our nation’s history, rewriting historical events, reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved, defacing and toppling statues in public places.

Defacing is the intent. Remove the faces–conveniently no longer around to “set the record straight”–that helped to define our country’s history and, in so doing, reshape foundational public memory; cultivate a specific political myth.

Efforts to force collective amnesia are as old as conquest. The Roman decree damnatio memoriae –’condemnation of memory’–punished individuals by destroying every trace of them from the city, down to chiseling faces off statues.

Former leading American political scientist and communications theorist Harold Lasswell contends, “Through the study of history, people are imbued with a particular cultural identity; therefore, by negatively revising history, the negationist [a person who denies or refutes something] 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 pseudo history 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.”

The term “negationism” was first coined by the French historian Henry Rousso in 1987 to distinguish between legitimate historical revisionism in Holocaust studies and politically-motivated denial of the Holocaust, which he termed negationism.

Former CIA operative, Tennent H. Bagley, who spent twenty-two years in that organization’s Clandestine Services division, eventually becoming the CIA’s chief of Soviet bloc counterintelligence, working against the KGB, writes, “Historical negationism applies the techniques of research, quotation, and presentation for deception of the reader and denial of the historical record. In support of the ‘revised history’ perspective, the negationist historian uses false documents as genuine sources, presents specious reasons to distrust genuine documents, exploits published opinions by quoting out of historical context, manipulates statistics, and mistranslates texts in other languages.”

Bagley pretty much nails it, doesn’t he!

E.J. Dionne, Jr., senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and university professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University, concludes, “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.’ “

Award-winning journalist Andrew Nagorski, who spent more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek, equates negationism as propaganda. In a Newsweek: World Affairs, March 2008 article, Nagorski notes, “…revised history is used to negate the validity of the factual, documentary record, and so reframe explanations and perceptions of the discussed historical event, in order to deceive the reader, the listener, and the viewer; therefore, historical negationism functions as a technique of propaganda.”

“Rather than submit their works for peer review, 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.,” ascribes British historian Richard J. Evans.

Evans goes on to say, “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, 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 willfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events, for which there is no historical evidence, in order to make their arguments more plausible.”

As I have quoted many times, “The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas–a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.” –Ronald Regan

That is why history must and ought to be zealously guarded with the intention of preserving truth and informing the next generation.

Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.