Genocide denial Totally Explained

Everything about Genocide Denial totally explained

Genocide denial occurs when an otherwise accepted act of genocide 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 the 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 isn't 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.
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 were states were free to implement the legislation as they saw fit.

Techniques used by genocide deniers

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 scientific 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:

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:
George Orwell writes in 'Notes on Nationalism' that
Israel Charney, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Israel, describes genocide denial by putting it into the following categories:

Notable genocide deniers

The government of the Republic of Turkey has long disputed that the mass killings of Armenian 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". The exhibition opened on 1 May 2007 3 weeks later than planned.
David Campbell has written of the now defunct British magazine Living Marxism that "LM’s intentions are clear from the way they've sought to publicize accounts of contemporary atrocities which suggest they were certainly not genocidal (as in the case of Rwanda), and perhaps didn't even occur (as in the case of the murder of nearly 8,000 at Srebrenica).[49]"
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 didn't 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.

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