| Abstract: | Conclusion The problem of revisionism, or efforts to deny and censor the incontrovertible history of known genocides, is a growing one.
It is now clear that denial is inevitably a phase of the genocidal process, extending far beyond the immediate politically
expedient denials of governments who are currently engaging in genocidal massacre or have just recently done so—i.e., the
Chinese government's abject denials of the killings of some 5,000 in Tiananmen Square, or the Sri Lanka government's denials
of the state-organized massacre of 5,000 Tamil. Denials of genocide continue long after the event by a variety of groups and
people, including successor governments or successor enemies of the victim people, such as anti-Semites against Jews, Turks
against Armenians, and bigots and celebrants of violence and murder of all sorts. But such denials also occur—and this is
the most perplexing fact—among a variety of not obviously malevolent people, including intellectuals who, in the process of
calling for a better world, effectively exonerate, support, encourage, and participate in denials of a known genocide, implicitly
condoning and even celebrating its occurrence, meanings, and portents for the future. This article is an effort to study and
analyze this latter phenomenon, which has been little recognized. Together with previous essays on the psychology of more
explicit malevolent denials of genocide, the intention is to generate a broader psychological theory of denials of genocide
and revisionism by proposing that there are also a variety of “innocent denials” of the factual reality or significance of
known cases of genocide, and a variety of “innocent disavowals of violence” which in truth celebrate the violence. These “innocent
denials” join with the well-known explicit bigots in creating a vast panorama of dangerous denials of genocides and implicit
calls to new genocides in our world.
The basic thesis of this article has been under development since its first presentation in a plenary address at the Soviet
Academy of sciences in Yerevan, Armenia in 1990 on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. |
