by Israel W. Charny
This is a detailed formal classification of many types of denials of the tragedy and evil of genocides. The original draft of this classification was published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2003.
Original Publication: Charny, Israel W. (2003). A classification of denials of the Holocaust and other genocide. Journal Genocide Research, 5(1), 11-34.
See also Charny, Israel W. (1999). Templates for Gross Denials of a Known Genocide: A Manual. In Encyclopedia of Genocide, ABC-Clio Publishers, p.168.
TEMPLATES FOR DENIALS: FREQUENTLY USED ARGUMENTS OF DENIERS
These templates were developed in a dialogue with Vartan Gregorian, then president of the New York Public Library, and were also based on joint research with Marjorie Housepian-Dobkin, author of the classic article, “The Unremembered Genocide,” published in Commentary magazine in 1966.
a. Deny outright the genocide or major aspects of the genocide: e.g., there was no organized plan of extermination, there were no gas chambers in the Holocaust
b. Claims the deaths took place inadvertently in wartime conditions or civil war or revolution
c. Pronounce that the massacres were not authorized by leaders, but a function of middle-civil bureaucrats, military-police squad excesses, or an amok populace
d. Minimize the magnitude of the genocide, i.e., state not so many died
e. Reverse roles, state that the victims were the real victimizers and any killing of them was in retaliation, civil war or self-defense; let alone claim the victimizers were the victims
f. Acknowledge periodically the historical genocide in order to appear fair and accurate, and then swing back into statements of denial
A Classification of Denials of the Holocaust and other Genocides
Note: A denial of a known genocide can be defined or attributed simultaneously to more than one category in the following classification.
A. MALEVOLENT BIGOTRY
1. DENIALS BY PERPETRATORS
1.01 Denials of Ongoing Genocidal Events by Perpetrator Governments and/or perpetrators
1.02 Denials of past genocidal events by perpetrator governemtns and/or perpetrators
1.03 Denials of genocide after the fact by perpetrators brought to trial
2. DENIALS BY NON-PERPETRATORS IN THE TRADITIONS OF FASCISM AND BIGOTRY
2.01 Denials by governments and government-sponsored bodies who continue the tradition of the perpetrator
2.02 Denials by various fascists, neo-fascists and bigots
B. FALSE CHARGES OF A VICTIM PEOPLE AS THE PERPETRATORS OF A GENOCIDAL EVENT AND NOT (OR NOT ONLY) THE VICTIMS
3. FALSE CHARGES OF VICTIMS
3.01 Reversal of roles of victims who are charged as perpetrators
A technique of reversal where the victims are charged with being the perpetrators, e.g., Turkish charges that the Armenians committed genocide against them
3.02 False Charges of Complicity or Responsibility for a Genocidal Event or Responsibility for a Genocidal Event
False accusations or attributions of significant responsibility for a genocidal event leveled against a people or government who are the objects of antagonism – political or cultural, e.g., attribution of the genocide of the Polish military leadership in the Katyn Massacre to the Nazis as a cover-up for the killings by the Soviets; e.g., accusations of Israel – the state embodying the continuity of Jewish identity after the Holocaust as having initiated the Israel War of Independence and/or having executed the war in fulfillment of a basic ideology (Zionism) of genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people. (See Martin Shaw in the Journal of Genocide Research); e.g., neo-liberal critiques and accusations of genocide by the United States in Cambodia and not the Khmer Rouge.
C. DENIALS OF GENOCIDAL ACTS BY ONE’S OWN VICTIM PEOPLE
4. DENIALS OF GENOCIDAL MASSACRES BY VICTIM PEOPLES
4.01 Denials of Genocidal Massacres in the Course of legitimate Battle against Ongoing Genocide of One’s Own People
e.g., Indians in Peru per the research by Nicholas Robins;
e.g, genocidal massacres by Armenian troops in the war in the Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians certainly felt they were fighting against a renewal of the years earlier Armenian genocide by a Turkish people);
e.g., denials of genocidal massacres by Israelis such as at Der Yassin in the War of Independence, and other events in the course of Israel’s wars of self-defense, where the underlying eitmotif for Israel necessarily is that they are fighting against a threat of the continuation of genocidal extinction of the Jewish people.
4.02 Victim Peoples Denials of Genocidal Acts against their Perpetrators or to Others
Refusal and inability of victim peoples to accept responsibility for their genocidal actions (or other serious human rights violations), as if accepting responsibility for perpetrating genocidal murder would erase or dilute the meaningfulness of the record of the same people as being victims of genocide by others
Victim peoples also engage in denials of their genocidal actions just like the perpetrators of genocide against them deny the genocide they made the victim people suffer,
e.g., to this day Serbians considerable denials of the genocide they perpetrated in Bosnia and Croatia, not a little in a spirit of retaliation against Croats for their genocide of the Serbian people during WWII; the Tamil in Sri Lanka who indeed were objects of genocidal massacres by the Sinhalese government, even as the Tamil themselves went about major genocidal campaigns, including developing patterns of suicide bombing to new heights than ever seen before in the world.
D. DENIAL AS A REJECTION OF AVAILABLE EVIDENCE OF MASS MURDER, OR AS A FAILURE TO ACT IN RESPONSE TO INFORMATION
5. DISTORTION AND EVASION OF AVAILABLE EVIDENCE OF MASS MURDER, and calculated avoidance of taking action to intervene and reduce ongoing mass murder, also to prevent incipient mass murder—often on the basis of denying that “genocide” is occurring — translation: a crime so serious that it is immoral not to take action
5.01 Denials as claims executions were carried out as legitimate acts of warfare, including legitimate suppression of resistance and sabotage and not as persecutory murders.
5.02 Denials as obstruction, distortion or misuse of information, evidence and research of facts of genocidal murder e.g., a dedicated liberal pacifist organization claimed that the reported brutal evacuation of Phnom Pen by the Khmer Rouge was part and parcel of a sincere agrarian revolution designed to improve the lives of the Cambodian people
5.03 Denial as refusal to define an ongoing mass slaughter of unarmed civilians as genocide
a. Resistance and procrastination in acknowledging clear and reliable reports of ongoing mass murders of civilians that clearly constitute genocide, thus delaying, subverting, and excusing failures of the international system to respond in a timely fashion,
e.g., the several years delay in recognizing the Cambodian Genocide by the UN Human Rights Commission that after several years ended up defining Cambodia as “auto-genocide”); long delay in defining genocide in the former Yugoslavia; similarly the failure to identify the genocide in Rwanda (a delay for which President Bill Clinton later apologized officially); e.g., delays in defining the sequence of killings in Sudan-Darfur-South Kordofan as genocide.
b. After the fact even bizarre denials of the facts and/or refusal to acknowledge that a known genocide constituted “genocide”
e.g., at the time of this writing, there appear, even from vaunted intellectual sources, denials of the genocide in Cambodia, the genocide in Srebrenica, and the genocide in Rwanda.
5.04 Denial as opposition, resistance and procrastination in activating meaningful interventions in ongoing genocidal events despite the fact that they have been identified as genocide
Even after mass murders have been recognized as constituting a genocide in process, a paralysis of action and/or largely indifference to undertaking significant rescue operations, and moves aiming to reduce, thwart, oppose, or prevent the genocide;
e.g., as of this writing (February 2012), a failure of neighboring countries or the international system to intervene in what has emerged as genocide by Syria against its citizens;
e.g., the failure of the United Nations to respond to requests by its commanding general (Romeo Dallaire) in Rwanda to send additional troops.
E. DENIAL OF CO-VICTIM PEOPLES BY OTHER VICTIM PEOPLES WHO DIED ALONGSIDE THEM
6. DENIALS OF CO-VICTIM PEOPLES
6.01 Refusal or considerable reluctance to identify other victims of a shared genocidal process, whether in official historical narratives of a people or in the educational system, or even if there is some minor acknowledgment of the other victims major omissions of the other victims in museums, commemorative events, education projects;
e.g., Jews’ failure to recognize significantly the Nazi genocidal murders of the Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses as identified target groups, in addition to massive killing of civilian populations as collective punishment for resistance to the Nazis and enforcing tyrannical Nazi control of the people;
e.g., Armenian’s long term failures and opposition to recognizing as fellow victims in the Armenian Genocide the Assyrians, Yezidis, Greeks, and several smaller groups killed by Ottoman Turkey
F. SELF-SERVING OPPORTUNISM
7. DENIALS IN THE SERVICE OF PERSONAL OR COLLECTIVE SELF-INTEREST OR POWER SUCH AS CAREERISM, PRAGMATISM, EXHIBITIONISM AND REALPOLITIK
7.01 Denials in the service of careerism, pragmatism, or realpolitik
7.02 Denials in the service of self-styled display of oneself in a provocative or aggressive counterculture position
a. Scandalous denials to gain public prominence and exhibitionistic display, including for political reasons, or in jockeying for academic exclusivity, power or notoriety
b. Denials as provocation, negativism and being annoying to large numbers of people or established society
G. ‘INNOCENT DENIALS’ AND/OR ‘INNOCENT DISAVOWALS OF VIOLENCE’ WHICH MAINTAIN VIEWS OF ONESELF AND/OR ONE’S PEOPLE OR SOCIETY AS JUST AND NOT EVIL
Note: It is extremely important to evaluate all apparently ‘innocent denials’ for possible degrees of manipulation and lying as camouflages for denial infiltration – See 5: MANIPULATION AND LYING THROUGH SEEMING ‘INNOCENT DENIALS’
8. ‘INNOCENT DENIALS’ WHICH DENY KNOWLEDGE OR BELIEVABILITY OF A GENOCIDE
8.01 Denials on a continuum from apparently or possibly ‘innocent’ lack of knowledge to more malevolent denial of available knowledge
a. Denials of the factual history of a genocide–including disinformation through denials of key facts which set a major tone of the event, whose discrediting casts a larger shadow of doubt on the total event even if it is not explicitly denied, e.g., claims that there were no gas chambers in the Holocaust, or ‘questioning’ of the validity of the Talaat telegrams, hence the central government’s mandating the Armenian Genocide
b. The facts of the genocide are not necessarily denied, and may even be tacitly recognized or even given fuller lip-service recognition, but perhaps ‘innocently’ they are contextualized, justified, relativized or otherwise deconstructed, e.g., there is nothing new about the Holocaust in the broad range of human history or the Ottoman government took necessary steps to preserve order
8.02 Denials on a continuum from apparently or possibly ‘innocent disavowals of violence’ to more explicit innuendos and open celebration of the genocidal violence
8.03 Need to maintain an innocent “just view” of a people, or of human life and society as a whole
8.04 ‘Innocent denials’ based on an extreme free speech position which supports the unqualified rights of deniers to present their views
a. Denials on a continuum from basically sincere beliefs in free speech and hearing all points of view to manipulative exploitation of the ideal of free speech in order to promote the propaganda of denial
b. Denials under the guise of historical debates
9. MANIPULATION AND LYING THROUGH SEEMING ‘INNOCENT DENIALS’
a. Confusion, contradiction, and double talk where elements of acknowledgment of facts of a genocide and/or expression of regret over deaths are mixed, purposely, with dissimulated texts of ‘innocent denial’ in order to weaken factual basis of a genocide
b. Manipulative dissimulation of seeming ‘innocent denial’ in order to infiltrate the academic community with denial positions
H. ‘DEFINITIONALISM’ OR INSISTENCE ON DEFINING CASES OF MASS MURDERS AS NOT GENOCIDE
The first and guiding question in all deliberations of mass murder is whether the event of loss of human life is marked by genuine memorial, sorrow and protest.
‘Definitionalism’ seriously distorts the common sense meaning and experience of a clear cut factual event of mass murders of unarmed civilians. By undue (obsessive, combative and competitive) focus on defining a case of mass murder as not “genocide,” definitionalism contributes or directly denies the worldwide commonly accepted concept of genocide as the consensual word for mass murder of groups of civilians. The work on definitions may be entirely legitimate, such as in a legal venue where the nature and degree of a crime must be debated, but Insofar as specialists in law or in any discipline need to sub-classify or further specify the nature and degree of a crime of genocide killing, e.g., intentional total genocide vs. crimes against humanity, vs. negligent genocide, the work of such sub-classification must never be done at the expense of desacralizing, demeaning or in any way diminishing the basic crime and horror that many human beings have been killed.
The test of any definition of mass murder must begin with its ability to evoke human sentiment and demand responsibility.
10. DENIALS ON THE BASIS OF EXCLUDING CASES FROM BEING DEFINED AS GENOCIDE
10.01 Denials on the basis of pedantic obsessive academic disputes and hairsplitting about details of an event to a point that obscures the event as a reality, and/or banishes moral outrage and sensitivity to its infamy and tragedy
10.02 Denials based on insistence that a case of mass murder cannot be defined as genocide but ‘only’ as another and in effect lesser category such as “accepted acts of war” or “government response to internal dissent”
a. Contextualizers–Not really “genocide” but another type of event such as war, civil war, wartime starvation and disease, revolution, deportations and resettlement
b. Justifers–Not really “genocide” but a response in self-defense against attack or threat of attack such as counter-terrorism, subversion or rebellion, or retaliation against the above in counter-massacres
10.03 Denials on the basis of escapes into legal loopholes that the people murdered were citizens of the perpetrator state, or not all were of a single ethnicity or religion, or that they were ‘simply’ political victims, hence the mass murders do not constitute genocide
11. DENIALS ON THE BASIS OF RATIONALIZATION, MINIMIZATION, RELATIVIZATION OR OTHER DECONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
11.01 Denials based on manipulation and/or minimization of statistics — not enough to be genocide
11.02 Denials justified by contrived arguments that not all members of a target group died or not all were intended victims, hence no genocide took place or was planned in the first place
11.03 Relativizers and deconstructionists–mass deaths that took place, however unfortunate, and perhaps even genocide, are no different than countless historical events of mass murder and do not justify undue emphasis; the victims drew the suffering on themselves by their own aggression
I. NATIONALISTIC HUBRIS OR SELF-INVOLVEMENT WHICH JUSTIFY EXCLUSION OF OTHERS
12. DENIALS OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GENOCIDE OF ANOTHER PEOPLE
12.01 Denials based on indifference to the fates of other victims
a. Not Knowing — not investing the effort to know the facts of the genocide of another people
b. Not Caring — not feeling emotional or spiritual involvement with the fate of another people
c. Justifications of indifference on the basis of being overly occupied with one’s own people’s problems
12.02 Denials accompanied by celebration of open antagonism in
fulfillment of revenge to a past perpetrator who has now become the victim of genocide
12.03 Denials based on insistence on uniqueness or superordinate meaning of one people’s genocide which is taken as a basis for exclusion or devaluation of another people’s genocide
12.04 Denials deriving from overly antagonistic responses to claims of uniqueness which result in minimization or irreverence for the genuine significance of the genocide for which claims of uniqueness were made
J. HUMAN SHALLOWNESS – THE DULLING AND DEPLETION OF A GENUINE SENSE OF TRAGEDY AND MORAL OUTRAGE
13. DENIALS DERIVING FROM ROUTINIZATION, DESENSITIZATION OR BANALIZATION OF EVENTS OF GENOCIDE
13.01 Denials based on acceptance of genocide as a routine event in history or inevitable in human nature
Sociologist Stanley Cohen: Information or facts are accepted, but implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.
13.02 Denials deriving from routinization of scholarship about genocide with an absence of moral concern
13.03 Denials deriving from trivialization of information about a genocide
a. A “one liner” in history books
b. Kitsche representations of suffering
13.04 Denials deriving from long-term cultural processes of routinization of memorials and depletion of meaning
a. Transformations of memorial events for genocide into essentially joyous family and community events (e.g., Passover celebration)
b. ‘Souvenirs’ of a genocide for the fetish of collection rather than out of memorial and commitment
K. DENIAL AS PERMISCUOUS LICENSE TO SAY ANYTHING AT ALL THAT SUITS THE EMOTIONAL/IDEOLOGICAL/POLITICAL MIND EXAGGERATIONS, OR EVEN DELUSIONS OF THE DENIER
14. DENIALS FROM A ‘BIG MOUTH’ THAT, FOR VARIOUS REASONS ALLOWS ITSELF TO SAY ANYTHING
Anything goes – just because I want to –for known political motives, often truly to be a show-off who draws a great deal of public attention by saying interestingly bizarre things (see iv in this classification); but often enough, almost without being linked to the previous motives, ‘simply’ as an expression of an omnipotent can say anything I want to narcissism about one’s mind products.
Denials of the Holocaust may be understood relatively easily as it were as anti-Semitism, and denials of the Armenian Genocide may be understood as promoting Turkish policy.
But there are denials of known genocides that are far less linked to known political motives that are rendered by well-known people, including intellectuals, government leaders, and church leaders, e.g., Noam Chomsky who has been involved in one way or another in supporting denials of the Holocaust, Cambodian Genocide and most recently the Rwandan Genocide, as well as the genocidal massacre in Srebrenica. Chomsky is not alone. A substantial array of bonafide PhD scholars and professors are not only guilty of denials, but devote themselves notoriously to promoting their denials as a major focus in their academic and especially public lives.
Denials of known and clearly factual genocides in many cases are made in the service of exhibitionistic seeking of prominence, exercising of negativism and antagonism. The denier allows oneself totally uncontrolled and undisciplined right to say anything at all, no matter how freakish or mad, and in many cases of well-known people, also to use one’s authority as an established political leader, church leader, or respected intellectual to endow their denials as if with respectability and authority.
Denials can also go beyond the above very real if ridiculous motives to constitute displays of mental illness. Curiously, insofar as one of the definitions or criteria of serious mental illness is blatant and bizarre distortions of reality, ‘crazy’ denials of the known facts of a known genocide qualify metaphorically as mental disturbances—although there are complicated conceptual problems in psychiatry that do not allow us to say outright at this time that the deniers are technically and clinically ‘crazy’ – even though humanly we can say precisely that, and/or that they are ‘crazy like foxes’ with their nasty agendas, and certainly trying to drive all the rest of us ‘crazy.’
Israel Charny is the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem and a past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is the author of Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind, and Fighting Suicide Bombing