Book burning Repositories of literature have been targeted throughout history (e.g., the
Grand Library of Baghdad, the burning of liturgical and historical books of the
St. Thomas Christians by the
archbishop of Goa Aleixo de Menezes) including recently, such as the 1981
Burning of Jaffna library and the destruction of Iraqi libraries by
ISIS during the
fall of Mosul in 2014. Similarly, British officials destroyed documents in
Operation Legacy to avoid records on colonial rule falling into the hands of countries declaring independence from Britain and any scrutiny of the British state.
Chinese book burning The
Burning of books and burying of scholars (), or "Fires of Qin", refers to the burning of writings and slaughter of scholars during the
Qin dynasty of
ancient China, between the period of 213 and 210 BC. "Books" at this point refers to writings on
bamboo strips, which were then bound together. The exact extent of the damage is hard to assess; technological books were to be spared and even the "objectionable" books, poetry and philosophy in particular, were preserved in imperial archives and allowed to be kept by the official scholar.
United States history The historical negationism of
American Civil War revisionists and
Neo-Confederates claims that the
Confederate States (1861–1865) were the defenders rather than the instigators of the
American Civil War, and that the Confederacy's motivation for secession from the United States was the maintenance of the Southern
states' rights and limited government, rather than the preservation and expansion of
chattel slavery. Regarding Neo-Confederate revisionism of the U.S. Civil War, the historian
Brooks D. Simpson says: "This is an active attempt to reshape historical memory, an effort by white Southerners to find historical justifications for present-day actions. The neo–Confederate movement's ideologues have grasped that if they control how people remember the past, they'll control how people approach the present and the future. Ultimately, this is a very conscious war for memory and heritage. It's a quest for
legitimacy, the eternal quest for justification." In the early 20th century,
Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the
United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), led the attack against
American history textbooks that did not present the "
Lost Cause of the Confederacy" version of the history of the U.S. Civil War. To that pedagogical end, Rutherford assembled a "massive collection" of documents that included "essay contests on the glory of the
Ku Klux Klan and personal tributes to faithful slaves". About the historical negationism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the historian
David Blight says: "All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently
racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the
white supremacist vision of Civil War memory."
California genocide Between 1846 and 1873, following the
conquest of California by the United States, the region's
Indigenous Californian population plummeted from around 150,000 to around 30,000 due to disease, famine,
forced removals, slavery, and massacres. Many historians refer to the massacres as the
California genocide. Between 9,500 and 16,000 California Natives were killed by both government forces and white settlers in massacres during this period. Despite the well documented evidence of the widespread massacres and atrocities, the public school curriculum and history textbooks approved by the
California Department of Education ignore the history of this genocide. some contemporary Japanese revisionists, such as
Yūko Iwanami (granddaughter of General
Hideki Tojo), propose that Japan's invasion of China, and
World War II, itself, were justified reactions to the Western imperialism of the time. On 2 March 2007, Japanese prime minister
Shinzo Abe denied that the military had forced women into
sexual slavery during the war, saying, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion". Before he spoke, some
Liberal Democratic Party legislators also sought to revise
Yōhei Kōno's apology to former
comfort women in 1993; likewise, there was the controversial negation of the six-week
Nanking Massacre in 1937–1938. In 2021, Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer published the book
The Comfort Women Hoax, in which he questioned prevailing historical interpretations of the Japanese military “comfort women” system. The book prompted criticism from historians. Shinzō Abe was general secretary of a group of parliament members concerned with history education () that is associated with the
Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and was a special advisor to
Nippon Kaigi, which are two openly revisionist groups denying, downplaying, or justifying various
Japanese war crimes. Editor-in-chief of the conservative
Yomiuri Shimbun Tsuneo Watanabe criticized the
Yasukuni Shrine as a bastion of revisionism: "The Yasukuni Shrine runs a museum where they show items in order to encourage and worship militarism. It's wrong for the prime minister to visit such a place". Other critics note that men, who would contemporarily be perceived as "Korean" and "Chinese", are enshrined for the military actions they effected as Japanese Imperial subjects.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings The
Hibakusha ("explosion-affected people") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seek compensation from their government and criticize it for failing to "accept responsibility for having instigated and then prolonged an aggressive war long after Japan's defeat was apparent, resulting in a heavy toll in Japanese, Asian and American lives".
EB Sledge expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings to be forgotten. Historians Hill and Koshiro have stated that attempts to minimize the importance of the bombings as "righteous revenge and salvation" would be revisionism, and that while the Japanese should recognize
their atrocities led the bombing, Americans also have to accept the fact that their own actions "caused
massive destruction and suffering that has lasted for fifty years".
Croatian war crimes in World War II Some Croats, including some high-ranked officials and political leaders during the 1990s and far-right organization members, have attempted to minimize the magnitude of the
genocide perpetrated against Serbs and other ethnic minorities in the World War II
puppet state of
Nazi Germany, the
Independent State of Croatia. By 1989, the future President of Croatia
Franjo Tuđman (who had been a
Partisan during World War II), had embraced
Croatian nationalism and published
Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, in which he questioned the official number of victims killed by the
Ustaše during
World War II, particularly at the
Jasenovac concentration camp. Yugoslav and
Serbian historiography had long exaggerated the number of victims at the camp. Tuđman criticized the long-standing figures, but also described the camp as a "work camp", giving an estimate of between 30,000 and 40,000 deaths. Croatia's far-right often advocates the false theory that Jasenovac was a "labour camp" where mass murder did not take place. In 2017, two videos of former Croatian president
Stjepan Mesić from 1992 were made public in which he stated that Jasenovac was not a death camp. The far-right NGO "The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp" also advocates this disproven theory, in addition to claiming that the camp was used by the Yugoslav authorities following the war to imprison Ustasha members and regular
Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged
Stalinists until 1951. The ideas promoted by its members have been amplified by mainstream media interviews and book tours. In 2016, Croatian filmmaker
Jakov Sedlar released a documentary
Jasenovac – The Truth which advocated the same theories, labelling the camp as a "collection and labour camp". The film contained alleged falsifications and forgeries, in addition to denial of crimes and hate speech towards politicians and journalists.
Serbian war crimes in World War II Among far-right and nationalist groups, denial and revisionism of Serbian war crimes are carried out through the downplaying of
Milan Nedić and
Dimitrije Ljotić's roles in the
extermination of Serbia's Jews in concentration camps, in the German-occupied
Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia by a number of Serbian historians. Serbian collaborationist armed forces were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of Jews as well as Roma and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance and the killing of many Croats and Muslims. Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders. In 1993, the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts listed Nedić among
The 100 most prominent Serbs. There is also the denial of
Chetnik collaboration with
Axis forces and
crimes committed during World War II. Serbian historian Jelena Djureinovic states in her book
The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution that "during those years, the WWII nationalist Chetniks have been recast as an
anti-fascist movement equivalent to
Tito's
Partisans, and as victims of communism". The glorification of the Chetnik movement has now become the central theme of Serbia's WWII memory politics. Chetnik leaders convicted under
communist rule of
collaboration with the Nazis have been rehabilitated by
Serbian courts, and television programmes have contributed to spreading a positive image of the movement, "distorting the real picture of what happened during WWII".
Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars There have been a number of far-right and nationalist authors and political activists who have publicly disagreed with mainstream views of
Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of 1991–1999. Some high-ranked Serbian officials and political leaders who categorically claimed that no
genocide against Bosnian Muslims took place at all, include former president of Serbia
Tomislav Nikolić, Bosnian Serb leader
Milorad Dodik, Serbian Minister of Defence
Aleksandar Vulin and Serbian far-right leader
Vojislav Šešelj. Among the points of contention are whether the victims of massacres such as the
Račak massacre and
Srebrenica massacre were unarmed civilians or armed resistance fighters, whether death and rape tolls were inflated, and whether prison camps such as
Sremska Mitrovica camp were sites of mass war crimes. These authors are called "revisionists" by scholars and organizations, such as
ICTY. The
Report about Case Srebrenica by
Darko Trifunovic, commissioned by the government of the
Republika Srpska, was described by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as "one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995". Outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures eventually forced the Republika Srpska to disown the report. In 2017 legislation that banned the teaching of the
Srebrenica genocide and
Sarajevo siege in schools was introduced in Republika Srpska, initiated by President
Milorad Dodik and his SNSD party, who stated that it was "impossible to use here the textbooks ... which say the Serbs have committed genocide and kept Sarajevo under siege. This is not correct and this will not be taught here". In 2019 Republika Srpska authorities appointed Israeli historian Gideon Greif – who has worked at
Yad Vashem for more than three decades – to head its own revisionist commission to "determine the truth" about Srebrenica.
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia The issue of the Volyn massacres was largely non-existent in Ukrainian scholarly literature for many years, and until very recently, Ukrainian historiography did not undertake any objective research of the events in Volyn. Until 1991 any independent Ukrainian historic research was only possible abroad, mainly in the US and the Canadian
diaspora. Despite publishing a number of works devoted to the history of UPA, the Ukrainian emigration researchers (with only few exceptions) remained completely mute about the Volyn events for many years. Until very recently much of the remaining documentation was closed in Ukrainian state archives, unavailable to researchers. rejecting the term "genocide".
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 Discussion of the killings was taboo in Indonesia and, if mentioned at all, usually called
peristiwa enam lima, the "incident of '65." Inside and outside Indonesia, public discussion of the killings increased during the 1990s and especially after 1998 when the New Order government collapsed. Jailed and exiled members of the Sukarno regime, as well as ordinary people, told their stories in increasing numbers. Foreign researchers began to publish increasingly more on the topic, with the end of the military regime and its doctrine of coercing such research attempts into futility. The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian histories and have been scarcely examined by Indonesians, and has received comparatively little international attention. Indonesian textbooks typically depict the killings as a "patriotic campaign" that resulted in less than 80,000 deaths. In 2004, the textbooks were briefly changed to include the events, but this new curriculum discontinued in 2006 following protests from the military and Islamic groups. John Roosa's
Pretext for Mass Murder (2006) was initially banned by the Attorney General's Office. The Indonesian parliament set up a truth and reconciliation commission to analyse the killings, but it was suspended by the
Indonesian High Court. An academic conference regarding the killings was held in
Singapore in 2009. A hesitant search for mass graves by survivors and family members began after 1998, although little has been found. Over three decades later, great enmity remains in Indonesian society over the events. Turkish laws such as
Article 301, that state "a person who publicly insults
Turkishness, or the Republic or [the] Turkish
Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment", were used to criminally charge the writer
Orhan Pamuk with disrespecting Turkey, for saying that "Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million
Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody, but me, dares to talk about it". The controversy occurred as Turkey was first vying for membership in the
European Union (EU) where the suppression of dissenters is looked down upon. Article 301 originally was part of penal-law reforms meant to modernize Turkey to
European Union standards, as part of negotiating
Turkey's accession to the EU. In 2006, the charges were dropped due to pressure from the European Union and United States on the Turkish government. The reporters were on trial for criticizing the court-ordered closing of a conference in Istanbul regarding the
Armenian genocide during the time of the
Ottoman Empire. The conference continued elsewhere, transferring locations from a state to a private university. The trial continued until 11 April 2006, when four of the reporters were acquitted. The case against the fifth journalist,
Murat Belge, proceeded until 8 June 2006, when he was also acquitted. The purpose of the conference was to critically analyse the official Turkish view of the Armenian genocide in 1915; a
taboo subject in Turkey. The trial proved to be a test case between Turkey and the
European Union; the EU insisted that Turkey should allow increased freedom of expression rights, as a condition to membership.
South Korean war crimes in Vietnam At the request of the United States,
South Korea under
Park Chung Hee sent approximately 320,000 South Korean troops to fight alongside the United States and South Vietnam during the
Vietnam War. Various civilian groups have accused the South Korean military of many "
My Lai-style massacres", while the Korean Ministry of Defense has denied all such accusations. Korean forces are alleged to have perpetrated the
Binh Tai,
Bình An/Tây Vinh,
Bình Hòa, and
Hà My massacres and several other massacres across Vietnam, killing as many as 9000 Vietnamese civilians. In 2023, a South Korean court ruled in favour of a Vietnamese victim of South Korean atrocities during the war and ordered that the South Korean government compensate the surviving victim. In response, the South Korean government repeated its earlier denials of the atrocities, and later announced its appeal of the decision. This strained relations with Vietnam, as a spokesperson for Vietnam's fording ministry called the decision "extremely regrettable".
Iran The
Islamic Republic of Iran uses historical negationism against
religious minorities in order to maintain legitimacy and relevancy of the regime. One example is the regime's approach to the
Baháʼí community. In 2008, an erroneous and misleading biography of
Báb was presented to all primary school children. In his official 2013
Nowruz address,
Supreme Leader of Iran Grand Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened." This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.
Soviet and Russian history In his book,
The Stalin School of Falsification, Leon Trotsky cited a range of historical documents such as private letters, telegrams, party speeches, meeting minutes, and suppressed texts such as
Lenin's Testament, to argue that the Stalinist faction routinely distorted political events, forged a theoretical basis for irreconcilable concepts such as the notion of "Socialism in One Country" and misrepresented the views of opponents. He also argued that the Stalinist regime employed an array of professional historians as well as economists to justify policy manoeuvering and safeguarding its own set of material interests. Prescribed ideology could still introduce biases in historians' work, but not all of Soviet historiography was affected. In the
historiography of the Cold War, a controversy over negationist historical revisionism exists, where numerous revisionist scholars in the West have been accused of
whitewashing the crimes of Stalinism, overlooking the
Katyn massacre in Poland, disregarding the validity of the
Venona Project messages with regards to
Soviet espionage in the United States, as well as the
denial of the
Holodomor of 1932–1933. In 2009, Russia established the
Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests to "defend Russia against falsifiers of history". Some critics, like Heorhiy Kasyanov from the
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, said the Kremlin was trying to whitewash Soviet history in order to justify its denial of human rights: "It's part of the Russian Federation's policy to create an ideological foundation for what is happening in Russia right now." Historian and author
Orlando Figes, a professor at the
University of London, who views the new commission is part of a clampdown on historical scholarship, stated: "They're idiots if they think they can change the discussion of Soviet history internationally, but they can make it hard for Russian historians to teach and publish. It's like we're back to the old days." The commission was disestablished in 2012..
Azerbaijan In relation to Armenia Many scholars, among them
Victor Schnirelmann,
Willem Floor,
Robert Hewsen,
George Bournoutian and others state that in Soviet and post-Soviet
Azerbaijan since the 1960s there is a practice of revising primary sources on the South Caucasus in which any mention about
Armenians is removed. In the revised texts,
Armenian is either simply removed or is replaced by
Albanian; there are many other examples of such falsifications, all of which have the purpose of creating an impression that historically Armenians were not present in this territory. Willem M. Floor and Hasan Javadi in the English edition of "The Heavenly Rose-Garden: A History of Shirvan & Daghestan" by
Abbasgulu Bakikhanov specifically point out to the instances of distortions and falsifications made by
Ziya Bunyadov in his Russian translation of this book. The Armenian cemetery in Julfa, a cemetery near the town of
Julfa, in the
Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan originally housed around 10,000 funerary monuments. The tombstones consisted mainly of thousands of
khachkars, uniquely decorated cross-stones characteristic of medieval Christian
Armenian art. The cemetery was still standing in the late 1990s, when the government of Azerbaijan began a systematic campaign to destroy the monuments. After studying and comparing satellite photos of Julfa taken in 2003 and 2009, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science came to the conclusion in December 2010 that the cemetery was demolished and levelled. After the director of the
Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky expressed his protest about the destruction of
Armenian khachkars in Julfa, he was accused by Azerbaijanis of supporting the "total falsification of the history and culture of Azerbaijan". Several appeals were filed by both Armenian and international organizations, condemning the Azerbaijani government and calling on it to desist from such activity. In 2006, Azerbaijan barred
European Parliament members from investigating the claims, charging them with a "biased and hysterical approach" to the issue and stating that it would only accept a delegation if it visited
Armenian-occupied territory as well. In the spring of 2006, a journalist from the
Institute for War and Peace Reporting who visited the area reported that no visible traces of the cemetery remained. In the same year, photographs taken from Iran showed that the cemetery site had been turned into a military
shooting range. The destruction of the cemetery has been widely described by Armenian sources, and some non-Armenian sources, as an act of "
cultural genocide." In Azerbaijan, the
Armenian genocide is
officially denied and is considered a hoax. According to the state ideology of Azerbaijan, a genocide of Azerbaijanis, carried out by Armenians and Russians, took place starting from 1813. Mahmudov has claimed that Armenians first appeared in Karabakh in 1828. Azerbaijani academics and politicians have claimed that foreign historians falsify the history of Azerbaijan and criticism was directed towards a Russian documentary about the regions of
Karabakh and
Nakhchivan and the historical Armenian presence in these areas. According to the institute director of the
Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Yagub Mahmudov, prior to 1918 "there was never an Armenian state in the South Caucasus". According to Mahmudov,
Ilham Aliyev's statement in which he said that "Irevan is our [Azerbaijan's] historic land, and we, Azerbaijanis must return to these historic lands", was based "historical facts" and "historical reality". As a result of the two
Russo-Iranian Wars of the 19th century, the border between what is present-day
Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan was formed. Although there had not been a historical
Azerbaijani state to speak of in history, the demarcation, set at the
Aras river, left significant numbers of what were later coined "Azerbaijanis" to the north of the Aras river. During the existence of the
Azerbaijan SSR, as a result of Soviet-era historical revionism and myth-building, the notion of a "northern" and "
southern" Azerbaijan was formulated and spread throughout the Soviet Union. During the Soviet nation building campaign, any event, both past and present, that had ever occurred in what is the present-day Azerbaijan Republic and Iranian Azerbaijan were rebranded as phenomenons of "Azerbaijani culture". Any Iranian ruler or poet that had lived in the area was assigned to the newly rebranded identity of the
Transcaucasian Turkophones, in other words "Azerbaijanis". According to Michael P. Croissant: "It was charged that the "two Azerbaijans", once united, were separated artificially by a conspiracy between imperial Russia and Iran". In the Azerbaijan SSR, forgeries such as an alleged "Turkish
divan" and falsified verses were published in order to "Turkify" Nizami Ganjavi. According to professor of history
George Bournoutian: Bournoutian adds:
North Korea and the Korean War Since the start of the
Korean War (1950–1953), the government of
North Korea has consistently denied that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched the attack with which it began the war for the Communist unification of Korea. The historiography of the DPRK maintains that the war was provoked by
South Korea, at the instigation of the United States: "On June 17, Juche 39 [1950] the then U.S. President Harry S. Truman|[Harry S.] Truman sent John Foster Dulles|[John Foster] Dulles as his special envoy to South Korea to examine the anti-North war scenario and give an order to start the attack. On June 18, Dulles inspected the
38th parallel and the war preparations of the '
ROK Army' units. That day he told
Syngman Rhee to start the attack on North Korea with the
counter-propaganda that North Korea first 'invaded' the south." Further North Korean pronouncements included the claim that the U.S. needed the peninsula of Korea as "a bridgehead, for invading the Asian continent, and as a strategic base, from which to fight against
national-liberation movements and
socialism, and, ultimately, to attain world supremacy." Likewise, the DPRK denied the
war crimes committed by the
Korean People's Army in the course of the war; nonetheless, in the 1951–1952 period, the
Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) privately admitted to the "excesses" of their earlier campaign against North Korean citizens who had collaborated with the enemy – either actually or allegedly – during the US–South Korean occupation of North Korea. Later, the WPK blamed every wartime atrocity upon the
U.S. Armed Forces, e.g. the
Sinchon Massacre (17 October – 7 December 1950) occurred during the retreat of the DPRK government from
Hwanghae Province, in the south-west of North Korea. The campaign against "
collaborators" was attributed to political and ideological manipulations by the U.S.; the high-ranking leader
Pak Chang-ok said that the American enemy had "started to use a new method, namely, it donned a
leftist garb, which considerably influenced the inexperienced cadres of the Party and government organs." Kathryn Weathersby's
Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives (1993) confirmed that the Korean War was launched by order of
Kim Il Sung (1912–1994); and also refuted the DPRK's
allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War. The
Korean Central News Agency dismissed the historical record of Soviet documents as "sheer forgery".
Holocaust denial Holocaust deniers usually reject the term
Holocaust denier as an inaccurate description of their historical point of view, instead preferring the term
Holocaust revisionist; nonetheless,
scholars prefer "Holocaust denier" to differentiate deniers from legitimate
historical revisionists, whose goal is to accurately analyse historical evidence with established methods. Historian Alan Berger reports that Holocaust deniers argue in support of a preconceived theory – that the Holocaust either did not occur or was mostly a hoax – by ignoring extensive historical evidence to the contrary. When the author
David Irving lost his
English libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher,
Penguin Books, and thus was publicly discredited and identified as a Holocaust denier, the trial judge,
Justice Charles Gray, concluded that "Irving has, for his own ideological reasons, persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that, for the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism." On 20 February 2006, Irving was found guilty, and sentenced to three years imprisonment for Holocaust denial, under Austria's 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalizing the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes". Besides Austria, eleven other countries – including Belgium, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Switzerland – have criminalized Holocaust denial as punishable with imprisonment.
North Macedonia According to
Eugene N. Borza, the
Macedonians are in search of their past to legitimize their unsure present, in the
disorder of the
Balkan politics.
Ivaylo Dichev claims that the Macedonian historiography has the impossible task of filling the huge gaps between the ancient
kingdom of Macedon, that collapsed in 2nd century BC, the 10th–11th century state of the
Cometopuls, and the
Yugoslav Macedonia established in the middle of the 20th century. According to
Ulf Brunnbauer, modern Macedonian historiography is highly politicized, because the Macedonian
nation-building process is still in development. The recent nation-building project imposes the idea of a "Macedonian nation" with unbroken continuity from the antiquity (
Ancient Macedonians) to the modern times, which has been criticized by some domestic and foreign scholars for ahistorically projecting modern ethnic distinctions into the past. In this way generations of students were educated in
pseudohistory.
Historiography in Africa , over five-thousand people seeking refuge in the
then Ntarama church were killed by grenade, machete, rifle, or burnt alive.
Rwandan genocide denial has proliferated in multiple contexts despite the fact that the mass killings took place amidst widespread news coverage and additionally later received detailed study during the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Perpetrators of violent attacks against civilians in
Rwanda, known as the "génocidaires", have been an element of this controversy. Concentrated details involving the planning, financing, and progress of war crimes have gotten unearthed, yet campaigns of denial endure given the influences of extremist ideologies surrounding ethnicity and race. In terms of the 21st Century, increased international debate and discussion have partially failed to prevent efforts obfuscating the facts surrounding the
Sudanese genocide. In March 2010,
Omer Ismail and
John Prendergast wrote for the
Christian Science Monitor warning of multiple distortions of reality with lasting implications given the actions of the then Khartoum-based government. Specifically, they alleged that the state had "systematically denied access to the
United Nations/
African Union observer mission [personnel] to investigate attacks on civilians, so many of these attacks go unreported and the culpability remains mysterious." Historical negationism within the territories of multiple African nations constitutes a crime from a
de jure legal perspective. For example, denying the Rwandan genocide has led to prosecutions in that country. However, the negative social affects from disinformation and misinformation have expanded in some cases using modern media.
In textbooks Japan ” erects a banner reading "[Give] the Children Correct History Textbooks". The
history textbook controversy centres upon the secondary school history textbook
Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho ("New History Textbook") said to
minimize the nature of
Japanese militarism in the
First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), in annexing Korea in 1910, in the
Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and in the
Pacific Theater of
World War II (1941–1945). The conservative
Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform commissioned the
Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho textbook with the purpose of traditional national and international view of that Japanese historical period. The
Ministry of Education vets all history textbooks, especially those containing references to imperialist atrocities due to a special provision in the textbook examination rules to avoid inflaming controversy with neighbouring countries; however, the
Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho de-emphasizes aggressive Japanese Imperial wartime behaviour and the matter of Chinese and Korean
comfort women. When it comes to the
Nanking massacre, the textbook only refers to it as the Nanking Incident, mentioning there were civilian casualties without delving into specifics, and mentioning it again in relation to the Tokyo tribunal, stating that there are multiple opinions about the topic with controversies continuing to this day (see
Nanking massacre denial). In 2007, the
Ministry of Education attempted to revise textbooks regarding the
Battle of Okinawa, lessening the involvement of the
Imperial Japanese Army in Okinawan civilian mass suicides.
Pakistan Allegations of historical revisionism have been made regarding Pakistani textbooks in that they are laced with
Indophobic, Hindu-hating and
Islamist bias. Pakistan's use of officially published textbooks has been criticized for using schools to more subtly foster religious extremism, whitewashing
Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent and promoting "expansive pan-Islamic imaginings" that "detect the beginnings of Pakistan in the birth of Islam on the
Arabian peninsula". Since 2001, the Pakistani government has stated that curriculum reforms have been underway by the
Ministry of Education.
South Korea 12 October 2015, South Korea's government has announced controversial plans to control the history textbooks used in secondary schools despite oppositional concerns of people and academics that the decision is made to glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (
Chinilpa). Section and the authoritarian dictatorships in South Korea during 1960s–1980s.The
Ministry of Education announced that it would put the secondary-school history textbook under state control; "This was an inevitable choice in order to straighten out historical errors and end the social dispute caused by ideological bias in the textbooks,"
Hwang Woo-yea, education minister said on 12 October 2015. According to the government's plan, the current history textbooks of South Korea will be replaced by a single textbook written by a panel of government-appointed historians and the new series of publications would be issued under the title
The Correct Textbook of History and are to be issued to the public and private primary and secondary schools in 2017 onwards. The move has sparked fierce criticism from academics who argue that the system can be used to distort the history and glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (
Chinilpa) and of the authoritarian dictatorships. Moreover, 466 organizations including
Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union formed History Act Network in solidarity and have staged protests: "The government's decision allows the state too much control and power and, therefore, it is against political neutrality that is certainly the fundamental principle of education." Many South Korean historians condemned
Kyohaksa for their text glorifying those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa) and the authoritarian dictatorship with a far-right political perspective. On the other hand, New Right supporters welcomed the textbook, saying that "the new textbook finally describes historical truths contrary to the history textbooks published by left-wing publishers", and the textbook issue became intensified as a case of ideological conflict. In
Korean history, the history textbook was once put under state control during the authoritarian regime under
Park Chung Hee (1963–1979), who is a father of
Park Geun-hye, former
President of South Korea, and was used as a means to keep the
Yushin Regime, also known as the Yushin Dictatorship; however, there had been continuous criticisms about the system especially from the 1980s when Korea experienced a
dramatic democratic development. In 2003, reformation of textbook began when the textbooks on Korean modern and contemporary history were published though the Textbook Screening System, which allows textbooks to be published not by a single government body but by many different companies, for the first time.
Turkey Education in Turkey is centralized, and its policy, administration, and content are each determined by the Turkish government. Textbooks taught in schools are either prepared directly by the
Ministry of National Education (MEB) or must be approved by its Instruction and Education Board. In practice, this means that the Turkish government is directly responsible for what textbooks are taught in schools across Turkey. In 2014,
Taner Akçam, writing for the
Armenian Weekly, discussed 2014–2015 Turkish elementary and middle school textbooks that the MEB had made available on the internet. He found that Turkish history textbooks describe Armenians as people "who are incited by foreigners, who aim to break apart the state and the country, and who murdered Turks and Muslims." The Armenian genocide is referred to as the "Armenian matter", and is described as a lie perpetrated to further the perceived hidden agenda of Armenians. Recognition of the Armenian genocide is defined as the "biggest threat to Turkish national security". Students are taught that Armenians were forcibly relocated to defend Turkish nationals from attacks, and Armenians are described as "dishonorable and treacherous".
Yugoslavia Throughout the post war era, though Tito denounced nationalist sentiments in historiography, those trends continued with Croat and Serbian academics at times accusing each other of misrepresenting each other's histories, especially in relation to the Croat-Nazi alliance. Communist historiography was challenged in the 1980s and a rehabilitation of Serbian nationalism by Serbian historians began. Historians and other members of the intelligentsia belonging to the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) and the
Writers Association played a significant role in the explanation of the new historical narrative. The process of writing a "new Serbian history" paralleled alongside the emerging ethno-nationalist mobilization of Serbs with the objective of reorganizing the Yugoslav federation. Using ideas and concepts from Holocaust historiography, Serbian historians alongside church leaders applied it to World War Two Yugoslavia and equated the Serbs with Jews and Croats with Nazi Germans. Chetniks along with the Ustashe were vilified by Tito era historiography within Yugoslavia. Monographs relating to Mihailović and the Četnik movement were produced by some younger historians who were ideologically close to it towards the end of the 1990s. Being preoccupied with the era, Serbian historians have looked to vindicate the history of the Chetniks by portraying them as righteous freedom fighters battling the Nazis while removing from history books the ambiguous alliances with the Italians and Germans. Whereas the crimes committed by Chetniks against Croats and Muslims in Serbian historiography are overall "cloaked in silence". During the Milošević era, Serbian history was falsified to obscure the role Serbian collaborators
Milan Nedić and
Dimitrije Ljotić played in cleansing
Serbia's Jewish community, killing them in the country or deporting them to Eastern European concentration camps. In the 1990s following a massive Western media coverage of the
Yugoslav Wars, there was a rise of the publications considering the matter on historical revisionism of
former Yugoslavia. One of the most prominent authors on the field of historical revisionism in the 1990s considering the newly emerged republics is
Noel Malcolm and his works
Bosnia: A Short History (1994) and
Kosovo: A Short History (1998), that have seen a robust debate among historians following their release; following the release of the latter, the merits of the book were the subject of an extended debate in
Foreign Affairs. Critics said that the book was "marred by his sympathies for its ethnic Albanian separatists, anti-Serbian bias, and illusions about the Balkans". In late 1999, Thomas Emmert of the history faculty of
Gustavus Adolphus College in
Minnesota reviewed the book in
Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans Online and while praising aspects of the book also asserted that it was "shaped by the author's overriding determination to challenge Serbian myths", that Malcolm was "partisan", and also complained that the book made a "transparent attempt to prove that the main Serbian myths are false". In 2006, a study by Frederick Anscombe looked at issues surrounding scholarship on Kosovo such as Noel Malcolm's work
Kosovo: A Short History. Malcolm has been criticized for being "anti-Serbian" and selective like the Serbs with the sources, while other more restrained critics note that "his arguments are unconvincing".
French law recognizing colonialism's positive value On 23 February 2005, the
Union for a Popular Movement conservative majority at the
French National Assembly voted a law compelling history textbooks and teachers to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in
North Africa". It was criticized by historians and teachers, among them
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who refused to recognize the
French Parliament's right to influence the way history is written (despite the French Holocaust denial laws, see
Loi Gayssot). That law was also challenged by left-wing parties and the former
French colonies; critics argued that the law was tantamount to refusing to acknowledge the racism inherent to French
colonialism, and that the law proper is a form of historical revisionism.
Marcos martial law negationism in the Philippines In the Philippines, the biggest examples of historical negationism are linked to the Marcos family dynasty, usually
Imelda Marcos,
Bongbong Marcos, and
Imee Marcos specifically. They have been accused of denying or trivializing the human rights violations during
martial law and the plunder of the Philippines' coffers while
Ferdinand Marcos was president.
Denial of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula A spin-off of the vision of history espoused by the "inclusive
Spanish nationalism" built in opposition to the
National-Catholic brand of Spanish nationalism, it was first coined by
Ignacio Olagüe (a dilettante historian connected to the early
Spanish fascism) particularly in the former's 1974 work
La revolución islámica en Occidente ("The Islamic revolution in the West").
Australia The
Indigenous Australian population plummeted in the
Australian frontier wars. The aboriginal people were regarded as lacking any concept of property or land rights: consequently, Australia was considered
terra nullius.
Massacres and
mass poisonings were carried out against indigenous people. Indigenous children were removed from their families in what is known as the
Stolen Generations. Several critics like
Andrew Bolt and
Keith Windschuttle have rejected the scholarly evidence pointing to the
genocide against Indigenous Australians and have accused historians like
Henry Reynolds and
Lyndall Ryan of deliberately fabricating Australian history to suit a political agenda.
Nakba Nakba denial is a form of historical denialism pertaining to the
1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight and
its accompanying effects, which
Palestinians refer to collectively as the "
Nakba" (). Underlying assumptions of Nakba denial cited by scholars can include the denial of historically documented violence against Palestinians, the idea that
Palestine was
barren land, and the notion that Palestinian dispossession were part of
mutual transfers between Arabs and Jews justified by war. ==Ramifications and judicature==