Historical negationism

Historical negationism, also called historical denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with historical revisionism, a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. In attempting to revise the past, historical negationism acts as illegitimate historical revisionism by using 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 mistranslating texts.

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech. Others have in the past mandated negationist views, such as California, where it is claimed that some schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide. Notable examples of negationism include denials of the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and the clean Wehrmacht myth. In literature, the have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via political agendas through state media, mainstream media, and new media, such as the Internet.