Historical revisionism (negationism)

Historical revisionism involves either the legitimate scholastic re-examination of existing knowledge about a historical event, or the illegitimate distortion of the historical record. For the former, i.e. the academic pursuit, see historical revisionism.^[1] This article deals solely with the latter, the distortion of history, which—if it constitutes the denial of historical crimes—is also sometimes called negationism.^[2][3]

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 mis-translating texts (in languages other than the revisionist's).^[4]

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalised the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; still others mandate negationist views.

Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian Genocide denial, Japanese war crime denial, and Soviet historiography.^[5][6]

In literature, the consequences of historical revisionism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.

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.^[7] Sometimes the purpose of a revised history is to sell more books or to attract attention with a newspaper headline.^[8] The historian James M. McPherson 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”.^[9]

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 [a] nation’s cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: To redefine [national] status in a changing world”.^[10] 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.^[11] 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.^[11] 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.^[12]

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 historians either manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. In the USSR (1917–91), the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet historiography treated reality and the party line as the same intellectual entity;^[13] Soviet historical negationism advanced a specific, political and ideological agenda about Russia and her place in world history.^[14]

Techniques of negationism

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.^[15] 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”.^[16] 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, in order to deceive the reader, the listener, and the viewer; therefore, historical negationism functions as a technique of propaganda.^[17] 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.^[4] In the practice of historiography, the British historian Richard J. Evans describes the technical differences, between professional historians and negationist historians:

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.^[18]

Deception

Deception includes falsifying information, obscuring the truth, and lying in order 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, and were peer-reviewed before publication; and deceptive history books, based upon incredible sources, and which were not submitted for peer review.^[19] The distinction among types of history-book rests upon the research techniques used in writing a history. Verifiability, accuracy, and openness to criticism are central tenets of historical scholarship. 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 perpetrated in the course of the Second World War (1939–45) and the Holocaust (1933–45). The negationist historian protects the historical-revisionism project by shifting the blame, censorship, distraction, and media manipulation; 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, in order to alter public perception of the first historical atrocity. Although such comparisons can 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: The historian Deborah Lipstadt said that the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs", such as the expulsion of Germans after World War II from Nazi-colonised lands and the formal Allied war crimes, is at the center of, and is a continually repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial, that such relativization presents "immoral equivalencies".^[20]

Examples

Book burning

Repositories of literature have been targeted throughout history (e.g., the Library of Alexandria), including recently, such as the Burning of Jaffna library and the destruction of Iraqi libraries by ISIS during the fall of Mosul.^[21]

Chinese book burning

The Burning of books and burying of scholars (traditional Chinese: 焚書坑儒; simplified Chinese: 焚书坑儒; pinyin: fénshū kēngrú; literally: "burning of books and burying (alive) of (Confucian) scholars"), or "Fires of Qin", is the purported burning of writings and slaughter of scholars during the Qin Dynasty of Ancient China, 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 official philosophy of government ("legalism") survived.

Nazi book burning

In the mid–1930s, the Nazi book burnings were part of a campaign of anti-intellectualism conducted throughout Germany and Austria by the Deutsche Studentenschaft (German Student Association) of the Third Reich (1933–45). The burning of books was a public ceremony in which the works of authors whose politics were classical liberal, anarchist, Socialist, pacifist, and Communist were fuel for bonfires. Given the official antisemitism of the Reich, the works of Jewish writers were specifically identified for burning; thus did Nazi Germany rid themselves of writers deemed subversive of the National Socialist ideology.

In Poland, the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Pol.: "Specjalna księga Polaków ściganych listem gończym", "Special Prosecution Book — Poland") was the book of political proscription for the killing of socially important Poles who might lead resistance against the Nazi Occupation of Poland (1939–45). Compiled before the Second World War began in 1939, the Special Prosecution Book — Poland contained lists that identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish élites — political and social activists, the intelligentsia, scholars, actors, former military officers — as enemies of the state dangerous to the Third Reich.^[22]

In Occupied France, anti-fascist exiles made a Library of Burned Books of every book that Adolf Hitler had ordered destroyed in France. The Library of Burned Books listed copies of titles that had been burned. The book burnings in France were an idea that the French fascists, of the collaborating Vichy government (1940–44), borrowed from the Nazis, to cleanse French culture of Jewish intellectualism and the foreign politics of pacifism, decadent literature, and degenerate art, as the Nazis had cleansed German culture. In the event, after the Final Solution had concluded, for the post-war world, the Nazis had planned to establish a museum of Judaism that would have featured selected books of Jewish culture, preserved in memoriam of the extinct Jews of Europe.^[23]

United States history

Confederate revisionism

The historical negationism of American Civil War revisionists and Neo-Confederates claims that the Confederate States of America (1861–65) were the defenders, rather than the instigators, of the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), and that the Confederacy's motivation for secession from the United States was the maintenance of the southern states' rights and limited government, rather than the preservation and expansion of the chattel slavery of Africans.^[24][25][26]

About confederate revisionism of the U.S. Civil War, the historian Brooks D. Simpson said that:

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, the eternal quest for justification.^[27]

In the early 20th century, Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), led the attack against American history textbooks that did not present the Lost Cause of the Confederacy (ca. 1900) 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 and personal tributes to faithful slaves”.^[28] About the historical negationism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the historian David Blight said:

All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the white supremacist vision of Civil War memory.^[29]

War crimes

Japanese war crimes

The post-war minimisation of the war crimes of Japanese imperialism is an example of "illegitimate" historical revisionism;^[30] some contemporary Japanese revisionists, such as Yuko Iwanami (granddaughter of General Hideki Tojo), propose that Japan's invasion of China, and the Second World War, itself, were justified reactions to racist Western imperialism of the time.^[31] On 2 March 2007, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe denied that the military had forced women into sexual slavery 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 Yohei Kono's apology to former comfort women in 1993;^[32] likewise, there was the controversial negation of the six-week Nanking Massacre in 1937–1938.^[33]

Shinzo Abe led the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and headed the Diet antenna of Nippon Kaigi, two openly revisionist groups denying Japanese war crimes.

Editor-in-chief of the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun Tsuneo Watanabe criticized the Yasukuni Shrine 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".^[34] 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 ("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".^[35] Historians Hill and Koshiro have stated that attempts to minimize the importance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist history.^[36] EB Sledge expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow us to forget the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings.^[37]

Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars

There have been a number of scholars and political activists who have publicly disagreed with mainstream views of Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of 1991–1999. Among the points of contention are whether the victims of massacres such as the Račak massacre and Srebrenica massacre were unarmed civilians or armed resistance fighters, whether death and rape tolls were inflated, and whether prison camps such as Sremska Mitrovica camp were sites of mass war crimes.

These scholars are labeled "revisionists" by their opponents. For example, Diana Johnstone's controversial book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions, questions whether genocidal killings occurred in Srebrenica. The book was rejected by publishers in Sweden^[38] prompting an open letter in 2003 defending Johnstone's book (and her right to publish) which was signed by, among others, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Tariq Ali and John Pilger: "We regard Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition."^[39][40] On the other hand, Richard Caplan of Reading and Oxford University reviewed the work in International Affairs, where he described the work as "a revisionist and highly contentious account of western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia".^[41] The historian Marko Attila Hoare called it "an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s—and an ill-informed one at that".^[38]

The Report about Case Srebrenica by Darko Trifunovic,^[42] commissioned by the government of the Republika Srpska,^[43] was described by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as "one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995".^[44] Outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures eventually forced the Republika Srpska to disown the report.^[43][45]

Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

Turkish laws such as Article 301, that state "a person who publicly insults Turkishness, or the Republic or [the] Turkish Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment", were used to criminally charge the writer Orhan Pamuk with disrespecting Turkey, for saying that "Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody, but me, dares to talk about it".^[46] The controversy occurred as Turkey was first vying for membership in the European Union (EU) where the suppression of dissenters is looked down upon.^[47] Article 301 originally was part of penal-law reforms meant to modernise Turkey to EU standards, as part of negotiating Turkey's membership to the EU.^[48] In 2006, the charges were dropped due to pressure from the Turkish government.^[47]

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).^[49] The reporters were on trial for criticising the court-ordered closing of a conference in Istanbul regarding the Armenian genocide during the time of the Ottoman Empire. 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, proceeded until 8 June 2006, when he was also acquitted. The purpose of the conference was to critically analyze the official Turkish view of the Armenian Genocide in 1915; a taboo subject in Turkey.^[50] The trial proved to be a test case between Turkey and the European Union; the EU insisted that Turkey allow increased freedom of expression rights, as a condition to membership.^[51][52] The Republic of Turkey does not deny the Ottoman Armenian casualties, but denies they were genocide, specifically claiming that said deaths were consequence of war, and also were criminal killings neither approved nor committed by the Ottoman Empire.

Soviet history

During the existence of the Russian SFSR (1918–1991) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) attempted to ideologically and politically control the writing of both academic and popular history. These attempts were most successful in 1934–52 period. According to Mehnert, the Soviets attempt to control academic historiography (the writing of history by academic historians) to promote ideological and ethno-racial imperialism by Russians.^[5] During the 1928–56 period, modern and contemporary history was generally composed according to the wishes of the CPSU, not the requirements of accepted historiographic method.^[5] According to some authors, such as Mehnert, this practice was fundamentally corrupt.

During and after the rule of Nikita Khrushchev (1956–64), Soviet historiographic practice is more complicated. Although not entirely corrupted, Soviet historiography was characterized by complex competition between Stalinist and anti-Stalinist Marxist historians.^[6] 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;^[54] nevertheless, despite the potential danger of proscribed ideology corrupting historians' work, not all of Soviet historiography was corrupt.^[6]

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 history of the Communist Party was revised to delete references to leaders purged from the party, especially during the rule of Joseph Stalin (1922–53).^{[note 1]}

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 in Poland and disregarding the validity of the Venona messages with regards to Soviet espionage in the United States.^[55][56][57]

Azerbaijan

Many scholars, among them Victor Schnirelmann,^[58][59] Willem Floor,^[60] Robert Hewsen,^[61] George Bournoutian^[62][63] and others state that in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan since the 1960s there is a practice or revising primary sources on the South Caucasus in which any mention about Armenians is deleted. For instance in the revised texts the word "Armenian" is either simply removed or is replaced by the word "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 Bakikhanov specifically point out to the instances of distortions and falsifications made by Buniatov in his Russian translation of this book.^[60] 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.^[63][61] Shnirelman thinks that this practice is being realized in Azerbaijan according to state order.^[58]

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.^[64]

In their turn Azerbaijani historians claim that the historians of other countries falsify the true history of Azerbaijan. As an example of falsifications Azerbaijani historians consider historical references about the presence of Armenians on the territory of Karabakh ^[65][66] (Azerbaijanis claim that Armenians appeared there only in 1828) or the fact that in these books there is no mention of "the powerful states of Azerbaijan with 5000 years of statehood history". ^[67] After the Director of the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky expressed his protest about the destruction of Armenian khachkars in Julfa he was accused by Azeris of supporting the "total falsification of the history and culture of Azerbaijan". ^[68]

In Azerbaijan the genocide of Armenians is officially denied and is considered a hoax. According to state ideology of Azerbaijan the genocide of Azerbaijanis, which was carried out by Armenians and Russians, took place starting from 1813.

North Korea

The Korean War

Since the start of the Korean War (1950–53), the government of North Korea has consistently denied that the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched the attack with which began the war for the Communist unification of Korea. The historiography of the DPRK maintains that the war was provoked by South Korea, at the instigation of the United States:

On June 17, Juche 39 [1950] the then U.S. President [Harry S.] Truman sent [John Foster] Dulles 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 to start the attack on North Korea with the counter-propaganda that North Korea first ‘invaded’ the south.^[69]

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, and, ultimately, to attain world supremacy."^[70] Likewise, the DPRK denied the war crimes committed by the North Korean army in the course of the war; nonetheless, in the 1951-52 period, the Workers' Party of Korea (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 war-time atrocity upon the U.S. military, 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. About which the high-rank leader Pak Chang-ok said that the American enemy had “started to use a new method, namely, it donned a leftist garb, which considerably influenced the inexperienced cadres of the Party and government organs.”^[71] In Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives (1993), by Kathryn Weathersby, confirmed that the Korean War was launched by order of Kim Il-sung (1912–1994); and also refuted the DPRK’s allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War. The Korean Central News Agency dismissed the historical record of Soviet documents as “sheer forgery”.^[72]

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;^[73] nonetheless, scholars prefer "Holocaust denier" to differentiate deniers from legitimate historical revisionists, whose goal is to accurately analyze historical evidence with established methods.^{[note 2]} 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.^[74]

Hence, as retroactive minimisation of the Holocaust, Holocaust deniers have attached themselves to the Heimatvertriebenen (ethnic Germans expelled mainly from the eastern quarter of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after the war), and have, per their opponents, attempted to use sympathy for said Germans, and blame the Jews for the suffering of the Heimatvertriebenen. Moreover, when the author David Irving^{[note 3]} lost his English libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin Books, and thus was publicly discredited and identified as a Holocaust denier,^[75] the trial judge, 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.^[76]

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 criminalising the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes".^[77] Besides Austria, eleven other countries^[78]—including Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Switzerland—have criminalised Holocaust denial as punishable with imprisonment.^{[note 4]}

In textbooks

South Korea

See also : The Diplomatic's article The Financial Time's article

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) ^[79] and the authoritarian dictatorships in South Korea during 1960s - 1980s.^[80]

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.

The 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. (‘Ministry unveils plan for history textbook publication system’, The Korea Herald_ 2015-10-12)

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 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 organisations 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.”

In fact, there once was a time in Korean history that the history textbook was put under state control. It was during the authoritarian regime under Park Chung-hee (1963-1979), who is a father of Park Geun-hye,^[81] the current President of South Korea, and was used as a means to keep the Yushin Regime (also known as Yushin Dictatorship).^[82] However, there had been continuous criticisms about the system especially from the 1980s when Korea experienced a dramatic democratic development. In 2003, liberalisation 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.

Japan

The history textbook controversy centers upon the secondary school history textbook Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho ("New History Textbook") said to minimise 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 Theater of the Second World War (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 vets all history textbooks, and those that do not mention Japanese war crimes and atrocities are not vetted; however, the Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho de-emphasises aggressive Japanese Imperial wartime behaviour and the matter of Chinese and Korean comfort women. It has even been denied that the Nanking massacre (a series of violences and rapes carried on by the Japanese army against Chinese civilians during the Second Sino-Japanese War) ever took place (see Nanking massacre denial).^[83] In 2007, the Ministry of Education attempted to revise textbooks regarding the Battle of Okinawa, lessening the involvement of the Japanese military in Okinawan civilian mass suicides.^[84][85]

Pakistan

Allegations of historical revisionism have been made regarding Pakistani textbooks in that they are laced with Indophobic 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".^[86] Since 2001, the Pakistani government has stated that curriculum reforms have been underway by the Ministry of Education.^[87][88][89]

Ex-Yugoslavia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo)

In the 1990s following a massive western media coverage of the Yugoslav civil war, there was a rise of the publications considering the matter on historical revisionism of the Ex-Yugoslav region. One of the most prominent authors on the field of historical revisionism in the 1990s considering the newly emerged republics is Sir 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. For example, following the release of Kosovo: A Short History (1998), the merits of the book were the subject of an extended debate in Foreign Affairs. Critics said that Malcolm's book Kosovo: A Short History (1998) was "marred by his sympathies for its ethnic Albanian separatists, anti-Serbian bias, and illusions about the Balkans".^[90] 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".^[91]

Russia

In May 2009, Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, established the History Commission of Russia (formally, the Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests) to counter aggressive attempts to rewrite history to Russian disadvantage, yet Alexander Cherkasov of the Memorial human-rights group, called it a regression to Soviet-era control.^[92] Historian Isaak Rozental says, "Their [the Kremlin's] approach is not to study history but to use it."^[93]

French law recognising colonialism's positive value

On 23 February 2005, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) 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 North Africa".^[94] Criticized by historians and teachers, among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who refused to recognise the French Parliament's right to influence the way history is written (despite the French Holocaust denial laws, see Loi Gayssot). That law was also challenged by left-wing parties and the former 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.^{[note 5][95][96]}

Ramifications and judicature

Some countries have criminalised historical revisionism of historic events such as the Holocaust. The Council of Europe defines it as the "denial, gross minimisation, approval or justification of genocide or crimes against humanity" (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^[97] 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").^[98] 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).^[99]

The Protocol requires participant States to criminalise the dissemination of racist and xenophobic material, and of racist and xenophobic threats and insults through computer networks, such as the Internet.^[100] Article 6, Section 1 of the Protocol specifically covers Holocaust Denial, and other genocides recognised 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.^[101] 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 judgement of 23 September 1998);^[101]

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).^[102] 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.^[100][103]

Domestic law

There are various domestic laws against negationism and hate speech (which may encompass negationism), in sixteen different countries including

• Austria (Article I §3 Verbotsgesetz 1947 with its 1992 updates and added paragraph §3h),^[104]
• Argentina (National Law 23054 and 23592),
• Belgium (Belgian Holocaust denial law),
• the Czech Republic,
• France (Gayssot Act),
• Germany (§130(3) of the penal code^[105])
• Hungary,
• Israel,
• Liechtenstein,
• Lithuania,
• Luxembourg,
• Poland (Article 55 of the law establishing the Institute of National Remembrance 1998),
• Portugal,
• Romania,
• Slovakia,
• and Switzerland (Article 261bis of the Penal Code).

Additionally, the Netherlands considers denying the Holocaust as a hate crime – which is a punishable offense.^[106] Wider use of domestic laws include the 1990 French Gayssot Act that prohibits any "racist, anti-Semitic or xenophobic" speech.,^[106] and the Czech Republic^[107] and the Ukraine^[108] have criminalised the denial and the minimisation of Communist-era crimes.

Negationism in fiction

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the government of Oceania continually revises historical records to concord with the contemporary political explanations of The Party. When Oceania is at war with 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 brainwashed to believe that Oceania and Eurasia always have been allies against East Asia.

The protagonist of the story, 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.^[109][110] 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.^[111]

See also

• Academic integrity
• Big Lie
• Black Legend
• Cognitive dissonance
• Doublethink
• Dunning School
• Dustbin of history
• History wars (Australia)
• Information warfare
• Lost Cause
• Memory hole
• Neo-Confederate
• Selective omission – biases to taboo some elements of a collective memory .

Cases of denialism

• Denial of the Holodomor
• Genocide denial
• Nanking Massacre controversy and denial
• Temple Denial

Notes

References

External links

• Untruth in the Classroom, 1994
• Why "revisionism" isn't
• Mad Revisionist: A parody site on historical revisionism
• Expert Witness Report by Richard J. Evans FBA presented at the trial "Irving vs. (1) Lipstadt and (2) Penguin Books"
• Revisionist History – a satirical look at historical revisionism
• Article about revisionism concerning the Amerindians by The Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law.
• Nizkor Project Web site answering Holocaust deniers

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