Denial
By Tony Taylor
Melbourne University Press, 2008
INTRODUCTION: The Pathology of Historical Denial
[Bold
emphasis added by Balkan Witness]
As a defence mechanism, denial is
perfectly normal; we use it every day. We may deny to ourselves, perhaps, that
we are drinking too much wine in the evening. We may deny that we are neglecting
our paid work by taking unauthorised time off to do some shopping. We may also
deny that our favourite sports team is tragically incompetent, externalising its
run of losses as sheer bad luck. And we see denial all around us. We know senior
managers of large organisations who deny that there is a staff morale problem,
even though absenteeism rates are high, in-house bickering is endemic and
efficiency is low. It is this kind of denial, as a defence mechanism, that helps
us and our senior managers to deal with circumstances in life that make us feel
uncomfortable or anxious. We tell ourselves and others that things are fine when
they aren't, and it is these self-deceptive white lies of denial that keep us
going. Denial is a day-to-day transactional business. It's just routine.
Denial becomes troublesome when the
game is stepped up a notch or two, when the defence mechanism turns into a
self-deceptive refusal to accept significant, life-affecting realities that are
obvious to the world at large. When Thabo Mbeki and the South African government
asserted (until 2006 at least) that HIV-AIDS was not a serious issue in their
country, with the health minister explaining that AIDS was actually an illness
that could be cured by garlic, beetroot and lemons, that was denial. When
President George W Bush, against growing evidence to the contrary, rejected the
criticism that his administration's intelligence failures had led to a faulty
strategy in the war against Iraq, that was denial. And when Chinese leader Deng
Xiao-Ping denied the scale and character of the massacre at Tiananmen Square,
that was denial (along with contempt for human rights and for foreign meddling). These were not white lies told to smooth away anxiety; they were significant
misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods constructed to meet internalised
psychological and external political needs. Not only are these self-deceiving
deniers stubbornly resistant to external reality; they also occupy positions of
authority, meaning that their denial is a powerful political tool. When it comes
to denying for personal gratification and for political gain, the deniers hold
all the cards, for the time being at least.
With his political denial, Mbeki was
probably torn between thinking that he was right but sensing that he was wrong.
Bush, in the circumstances, couldn't afford to tell himself that he was wrong.
Deng deceived himself by following the expedient party line in refusing to
accept a widely held belief (outside China) that the students of Tiananmen were
peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrators. Observers and commentators may be angry
about these types of contemporary political denials, but with much of the
evidence still to be released concerning motivation, occurrence and causation,
all they can do is conjecture, search for more clues and grumble about a half-known and half-explored present.
In contrast to political denial, with
historical denial, it is a self-deceiving fantasy about a more fully known and
explored past that makes observers angry, bearing in mind that interpretations
of the past change, just as times change. Historical denialist fictions may make
perfect, delusory sense to deniers, whose motivation to deny, as we shall see,
is a self-protective irrationality; but denial provokes astonishment from
bemused and exasperated onlookers, who may well think that denialist distortion
of key facets of past events is just a spiteful version of flat earthism. More
specifically, informed observers, such as working historians, tend to be
dismissive of historical denialism, writing off both individual and
organisational deniers as cranks motivated by personal or ideological agendas.
Indeed, much professional historical commentary takes the phenomenon of denial
at face value, treating it as an inexplicable, marginal activity peopled by
stubborn fantasists.
Even when historical denial is taken
seriously, individual historians have tended to confine themselves to examining
it on a topic-by-topic basis. There are books about Holocaust denial, communist
denial and Turkish denial, for example, but there is little written on denial as
a historical genre in its own right. Even within these specialist historical
topics, there is a tendency for historians to become distracted by testing out
the content or substance of the denial rather than trying to establish its
pathology - what it is that makes these deniers tick. Diverted by denouncing
and proving the deniers to be impostors, the opponents of denialism have, in
many instances, passed up the chance either to explain why deniers do what they
do or to seek any deeper, functional basis for this strange and enduring
phenomenon.
The key to historical denial lies in
its self-deception transformed into an attempted deception of others, and this
process tends to follow certain behavioural patterns. This book will deal with
historical denial as an activity that has its own underlying structure based on
several observable psychological characteristics. The argument here is that
deniers share certain traits that may be categorised in psychological terms,
although there are variations in their emphasis and applicability. Historical
denial is viewed as about more than a capricious desire to block and shock, more
than a personal or political desire to oppose. Once an individual or group
wishes to convince others of their self-deceiving distortion of historical
reality, the utterances of that individual or group will tend to follow the same
processes employed by an individual using psychological denial. For example, to
convince oneself that an unpleasant truth of one's own life is not so - no, I do
not drink too much wine in the evening - one may repress knowledge of how many
bottles of wine one buys, claim to be just a social drinker, point to others who
drink much more (whether they do or not), and dismiss, ignore or hide the empty
bottles. Similarly, a political leader or a writer who wishes to deny
interpretations of past events may repress uncomfortable feelings or thoughts,
claim to be an objective observer, discuss others' alleged misdeeds and dismiss,
ignore or suppress any contradictory evidence.
Having established this proposition,
that historical denial has a psychological dimension, the application of
denialism's common characteristics will be considered in detail in this book,
through an examination of six illustrative case studies taken from modern
history. The case studies chosen are, in chronological order: Turkish denial of
genocidal behaviour towards Armenians; Holocaust denial; Japanese denial of
wartime atrocities; British communist denial of Stalinist crimes against
humanity; Serbian and Marxist denial of genocide in Bosnia; and Australian
denial of the maltreatment of Indigenous Australians.
The choice of these particular
twentieth-century topics was based on several factors: It is only in the
twentieth century that we have seen the promulgation of a series of constraining
international conventions and declarations that have attempted to limit, through
international condemnation and sanctions, the excesses of brutal regimes and
organisations. From 1899 onwards, following the adoption of the first Hague
convention, originally framed to govern conduct in war, a growing international
awareness of the continuing conflict between human rights on the one hand and
ruthless political, religious or economic ambition on the other produced a
parallel growth in denialism. Perpetrators and their supporters, trying to stay
within the bounds of what has become increasingly accepted as lawful behaviour
regarding human rights, rationalise away their excesses through practices of
denial, which may vary in character but remain consistent in form and function.
The first of these consistencies in
denialist form is hostility by the majority of deniers towards a particular
'other' or group of 'others'. That is to say, they are, as individuals and as
groups, bigoted; indeed, in some cases, they are deeply prejudiced to the point
of showing intense hatred. For example, Turkish bias against Armenians is still
alive and well among some Islamic extremist sections of the Turkish community;
neo-Nazis enthusiastically maintain their anti-Semitism; Japanese
ultra-nationalists continue to be racially contemptuous of their Chinese and
Korean neighbours; Serbian ultra-nationalists loathe their Muslim neighbours to
the west and to the south; and some Australians who support the denialist
position seem to have an obsession more with the condition of Indigenous history
than with the condition of Indigenous Australians. There are exceptions; for
example, in their pro-Stalinist condition of denial, British Marxists did not
consciously display racist or ethnic intolerance, unlike their hero.
When they do exist, these different
prejudicial perspectives occur on a denialist continuum that ranges from those
at the extreme end who might sponsor assassinations, bombings and other forms of
violence to the relatively restrained deniers whose activities lie mainly in
publishing and public speaking, and also generally within the criminal law. This
denialist continuum remains a measure of prejudice from the fanatical end of the
scale to the merely abhorrent.
To place this kind of prejudice in
context and to see how it relates to the functioning of denial, the work of US
social psychologist Gordon Allport is particularly valuable. Allport, a pioneer
in the field of prejudice whose 1954 classic The Nature of Prejudice had a huge
impact in the 1960s and thereafter, gave prejudice some theoretical and
practical context by moving beyond a merely psychodynamic definition. He
described the prejudiced individual as a person who holds a hatred based upon a
'faulty and inflexible generalization'. This was an of-its-time definition that
did not, for example, include gender issues, and some of Allport's pre-feminist
thinking has since been challenged as the basis of subsequent research. However,
the characteristics of prejudiced individuals or groups identified by Allport,
and by his successors, include some recognisable traits that hold today among
deniers: acquiescence to authority and leaders; emotional inhibition; belief in
order and discipline; hostility towards an easy target; distrust of others who
are different; simplistic analysis of complex circumstances; antagonism to ideas
beyond their frame of reference; belief in the purity of self and in the evil of
a different other; and belief that their own group is superior to other groups.
As we shall see, these traits manifest themselves repeatedly among individual
deniers and, to some extent, form a behavioural basis for institutional denial.
The second consistency in denialist
form is the attachment of deniers to outrageous beliefs, an attachment that
appears to defy logic and seems only to increase in intensity as yet more
evidence comes to light that contradicts the denialist position. Again, in line
with the facile view that deniers are misguided idiots, critics of denialism see
this simply as an extreme form of obstinacy: the tendency of a denier, drowning
in a sea of refutation, to clutch at straws. However, there is more to this
stubbornness than meets the eye, and to explain exactly what is going on, the
work of Leon Festinger, yet another pioneering US psychologist, who developed
the concept of cognitive dissonance, is both apposite and helpful. In his book
A
Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Festinger argued that the self seeks
internal consistency of beliefs, but, if faced with two competing belief
systems, resolution of this uncomfortable state of mind may be sought by
rejecting one system and by increasing adherence to the remaining system. For
example, if a group has an unfolding organisational memory (or history) that
imagines Stalin to be especially good, but this organisational memory is
increasingly confronted by evidence that unambiguously shows that Stalin was
especially bad, the result will be an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance within
the group. Festinger's approach, although qualified and modified by later
research, thus helps to explain why, when the evidence for one set of denied
events becomes increasingly incontrovertible, the deniers simply cling to their
original position, tightening their grip and rationalising away any new findings
that contradict their beliefs. Festinger also pointed out that when cognitive
dissonance reaches breaking point, an individual will either strongly reinforce
already held views or reject them. This finding is borne out, for example, when
we consider those British Marxists who, after enduring decades of increasing
cognitive dissonance, finally broke with communism over the Soviet suppression
of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and at the others, who remained within the
Communist Party of Great Britain, notwithstanding the clearly appalling
behaviour of Soviet authorities.
The third consistency in denialism is
found in the way in which almost all of its attributes can be grouped within the
overarching concepts of repression and projection, two key defence mechanisms
that were first outlined by Sigmund Freud in a psychoanalytic context and later
refined by his daughter Anna.
Repression is a method used by the
self (in this case, the denier) to deal with an anxiety-producing condition (in
this case, knowledge of a discomfiting past), by blotting out the unsavoury
details, contradicting any commentary that may include anxiety-producing
symptoms and fabricating a reassuring, if deluded, worldview. Such is the case,
for example, with Marxist denial of Serb atrocities in Bosnia.
To bolster their defences against
unwelcome intrusions from more realistically grounded others, deniers may also
employ projection as a defence mechanism. This is the attributing of one's
own feelings or motivations to others. For example, deniers will commonly accuse
their opponents of a conspiracy against the denialist position when, as it
happens, the deniers themselves are engaged in a conspiracy or coverup of their
own. Or, if the denialist case is concerned with rejecting accusations of mass
murder, the projectionist position will argue that the victims of the mass
murder committed murder on the same or similar scale or were so provocative that
they brought the punitive killings upon themselves, an argument that
contemporary Turkish nationalists have made against their Armenian accusers
about the massacres of 1915. This form of projection, which includes the view
that the deniers' opponents are out to get them and repression of the idea that
it is they, in the first place, who are out to get their opponents, produces in
the deniers a feeling of increased self-confirmation and solidarity, which
allows them to continue to cope with their fearful version of reality.
Moving beyond her father's basic
analysis of repression and projection, Anna Freud extended the ideas by
categorising denial, again within a psychoanalytic context, into four major
forms, which provide a useful set of behavioural categories.
The first category of denial is
simple denial, or a blocking of reality, despite overwhelmingly contrary
evidence that is generally regarded as unassailable. In modern Japan, for
example, nationalists refuse to believe that imperial Japanese troops carried
out countless barbaric atrocities, preferring instead to think that accusations
of appalling military behaviour during World War II are part of a foreign
conspiracy against the honour of Japan.
The second category lies in deeds, or
taking action, to support denial. For example, in Turkey, as we shall see, under
Article 301 of the criminal code, it is illegal to defame Turkishness by
commenting on the 1915 Armenian massacres in a way that suggests Turkish
involvement was a genocidal act.
The third category of denial is
fantasy, in other words maintaining a belief in unsound ideas by creating
fantasies around the object of the denial. Holocaust deniers provide the most
florid examples of fantasy with their view, for example, that Adolf Hitler was a
much-maligned leader. And, the deniers may continue, even if it is the case that
large numbers of Jews were killed, the Fuhrer was, in reality, both the
unwitting chief of organisations staffed by over-zealous underlings and the
victim of post-war Jewish conspiracies and lies.
The fourth category is the use of
carefully chosen words to perpetuate the mistaken belief. The single most
significant word in current denialist vocabulary is 'revisionism', generally the
rewriting of history either using new evidence or re-interpreting existing
evidence. In making the assertion that they are ' revisionists', the deniers
hope to place themselves on a scale of legitimate historical inquiry that ranges
from orthodoxy to heterodoxy, with themselves situated at the (respectably)
heterodox end.
There are other, less common forms of
denial that are clearly manifested in the behaviour of some individual deniers.
In Freudian terms, the more specific neuroses of grandiosity and narcissism are
often associated with the overarching neuroses of repression and projection.
Grandiosity is a boastful and pretentious tendency to regard the self as a mover
and shaker when others do not share this view. To deal with possible external
rejection, grandiose personalities demand recognition for fantasised
achievements and tell lies to gain credibility. There are several deniers
discussed in the following chapters who exhibit grandiose behaviour. Narcissists
display symptoms similar to grandiosity; indeed the two are commonly linked.
Narcissists inhabit a self-absorbed and conniving world and have a tendency to
use and abuse others to gain attention that will prop up their self-regarding
fantasies. They become enraged when obstructed or when their defences are broken
through and they are revealed for what they are. While conventional narcissists
may behave in a callously seductive fashion to achieve their goals, in an
inverted form of the neurosis, the more that denialist narcissists behave in an
outrageous and manipulative fashion, the more reinforcement they feel they are
obtaining for their view of self as the centre of attention. As with
grandiosity, this form of narcissism is exhibited in the most extravagant
fashion by several of the individual deniers discussed in this book.
A composite picture now begins to
emerge of deniers as individuals or groups who, in making false claims,
frequently display behaviour and opinions consistent with deep-seated prejudice,
including: belief in the wickedness of others, the infallibility of the self and
the supremacy of right-minded authority; vindictive attacks on supporters of
opposing points of view; obsessive fear, to the point of neuroticism, of attack,
while attacking others; stubborn refusal to believe widely accepted rational
explanations for past events; defence of their position through actions that, at
worst, may include violence, and, at least, may include a vexatious form of
litigation; re-emphasis on the strength of their beliefs while rationalising
away rebuttals in order to cope with contradictions in their own convictions;
and overweening egotism combined with an inability to see themselves as others
see them.
When it comes to ego, there is an
interesting common feature in the case studies that follow. Without wanting to
linger for too long in Freudian constructions, each set of deniers discussed has
an ego ideal, an iconic pater familias, so to speak. Among Turkish deniers, it
is Kemal Ataturk; among Holocaust deniers, Hitler; among Japanese deniers, the
emperor; among Marxist deniers, Stalin; among Serb deniers, Milosevic; and among
Australian deniers, long-serving prime minister John Howard, a fatherly hero in
the battle against progressivist thinking. Not all of these father figures have
much in common; their inclusion in the pantheon of denial has more to do with
the way in which denialism operates (uncritical respect for a superior
authority) than it has to do with universality of behaviour.
Deniers not only appear to have a
pathology, or a symptomatic commonality of motivation and process, but also
adopt a common set of techniques, including falsely claiming scholarly or
technical expertise; using straw-man reasoning (the attributing of false
assertions to others to distract argument); focusing on relatively insignificant
and apparently inconsistent events that bolster their argument; forcing the
counter-denier into arguing about an event of minor significance in a manner
that steers the debate well away from the larger mass of corroborated evidence;
attacking minor inconsistencies in the arguments of others while ignoring or
denying major flaws in their own position; contradicting widely accepted
evidence or deriding it as a product of a conspiracy, thus placing opponents in
the position of proving a negative; accepting evidence as proven or corroborated
even when there is neither valid proof nor corroboration; misrepresenting the
views of opponents; making outrageous statements in public to attract media
attention and notoriety; choosing to defy authorities or the law to gain
publicity and martyrdom; picking public appearances carefully to take advantage
of media ignorance; and telling lies. It is through these techniques that the
denialist betrayal of history takes place.
In the first instance, denialism
betrays history by attempting to distort our understandings of the actual past,
or history, as it was lived. It does this by wilfully bending the evidence to
suit the unyielding and self-interested purpose of the deniers. The second
betrayal lies in denialism's scorn for the primary principles of historical
investigation, which include following the evidence, balancing the arguments and
providing a coherent and justified explanation. The third betrayal is found in
misrepresentation: not only the deniers' misrepresentation of opponents'
arguments, a common enough tactic, but also the false claims of historical
authenticity made by the deniers themselves.
Another common feature of historical
denial that seems to be almost axiomatic is that the more traumatic the event,
the more strenuous the denial. The most strenuous forms of denial surround the
issue of genocide and its definition. It is important, therefore, to clarify the
exact meaning of the word 'genocide'. It was created by US Justice Department
lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 report 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of
Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress', as a
context-specific reference to the Holocaust. Lemkin's term was adopted
internationally as one of several 'crimes against humanity' as defined in the
Nuremberg Charter (or the Charter of the International Military Tribunal), and
later by the United Nations (UN), under Resolution 96-1 of December 1946 and
Resolution 260-111 of December 1948. The fact that the term was created at a
certain time does not mean, as some deniers assert, that it may not be applied
retrospectively to events that preceded its adoption. Indeed, the worst
consequences of the Holocaust itself preceded the creation of Lemkin's
neologism, which had a precise but generally applicable etymology, from the
Greek genos, meaning 'people' and the Latin caedo, meaning 'I murder', the
latter commonly used prior to 1944 in the words patricide and matricide.
During the negotiations that preceded
the UN resolutions, however, the Soviet Union, having just done its pre-war best
to annihilate the 'counter-revolutionary' Ukrainians and still busily
incarcerating and killing its people in the Gulags, was keen to avoid
including political crimes within the term 'genocide'. That is why the final
UN definition focused on 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part [emphasis
added], a national, ethnical, racial or religious group', but not a political
group. According to the definition, destruction of members of such groups may be
through outright killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately
inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group's physical
destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births
within a group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group. The important point here is that because the term genocide is so closely
associated with such a dreadful event as the Holocaust, delinquent nations,
groups and individuals will do all they can to avoid categorisation as genocidal
any violent activities for which they may have been responsible.
As tight a definition as it may seem,
the UN version of genocide still exhibits some serious semantic flaws, as
genocide scholar Eric Weitz has pointed out. For example, the Indonesian
campaign against its Chinese minority in the 1960s, which resulted in the deaths
of approximately half a million civilians, may be construed by its defenders as
a political (hence non-genocidal) campaign, a classic piece of denialist
casuistry. On that basis, the Khmer Rouge may technically be accused of genocide
only against their minority populations, because their murderous 1970s campaign
against their own people was, it may be argued, politically motivated.
Deniers also use the numbers argument
to defend their position, adopting a piece of logic chopping known as 'denying
the antecedent'. This is how the argument goes: Anything of the nature and
numbers of the Holocaust is genocide; if any event does not have the nature and
numbers of the Holocaust, it is not genocide. To put it another way, the
Holocaust equals genocide; therefore, genocide must equal the Holocaust. The
first problem here is that, when it comes to the nature of the event, the
Holocaust was a specific historical occurrence that had certain attributes,
including intent and a comprehensive, industrially run extermination campaign.
If other mass murders do not have these precise attributes, this does not
automatically disqualify them from being considered genocidal. The second
problem, the numbers debate, is a red herring, since the key phrase in the UN
definition is 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part': under Lemkin's
rules, it allows that an intentional plan to harm, for example, part of a small
clan, a tribe or an ethnic community of several hundred can be genocidal.
Proportion is one thing; numbers are another - it is the proportion that counts.
For example, the international legal definition of mass murder has come to
include the 1990s euphemism 'ethnic cleansing', but only in certain
circumstances is this considered genocidal, as in the case of Bosnia between
1992 and 1995. The Serbian plan to create a Muslim-free zone in the Upper Drina
Valley by means of murder, rape and destruction of property was confirmed as
genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and by
the International Court of Justice in 2007, but solely in the case of the
massacre at Srebrenica. In this, the ICTY and ICJ's judgment was not in accord
with a broader version of genocide as 'intent to destroy', a formulation agreed
upon by a nonbinding UN General Assembly resolution in 1993. The 1948 and 2007
definitions currently hold sway in international law.
The UN definition of genocide, while
including highly localised atrocities such as Srebrenica, excludes, on the above
grounds, such violent incidents as the terror attack on civilians in Guernica in
1937; the indiscriminate bombings of Rotterdam and Coventry, and the London
Blitz, in 1940; the fire-bombings of Hamburg in 1943, and of Dresden and Tokyo
in 1945; the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; the Red Army
violence against German civilians in Berlin in April 1945; the Soviet expulsion
of Germans from East Prussia in 1945; and the post-war Czech expulsion of
Sudeten Germans from the Czech borderlands, also in 1945. Although all were
morally questionable assaults that led to dreadful civilian casualties, their
exclusion is based on the view that the Germans and the Allies (in these cases)
had no intention of destroying the people of Spain, the Netherlands, England,
Japan and Germany 'in whole, or in part'.
Genocide, therefore, is about intent;
it is about proportion but not necessarily numbers; it is retrospectively
applicable. This definition separates genocide from such terms as massacre
(general slaughter), mass murder (killing of many individuals), ethnic cleansing
(forced expulsion, usually involving brutality and murder) and Holocaust (a
specific historical event, despite attempts to gain ownership of the proper noun
by non-Jewish survivor groups).
Finally, a note about
Denial. This
book is intended for the general reader. In presenting its findings as a series
of introductory essays, it is based on scholarly and other sources that are, in
many cases, relatively inaccessible or highly specialised. The essays themselves
cover six discrete areas of modern history, and the structure of each chapter is
shaped by its own story. For example, four of the less familiar narratives are
given detailed backgrounds (Turkey, Japan, Bosnia and Stalinism), while the
Holocaust and Australian chapters focus more on denial and on the arguments
about denial than they do on the well-known narrative of the Final Solution and
the less well known but fairly easily summarised narrative of the dispossession
and deaths of Indigenous Australians.