Genocide denial

Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize statements of the scale and severity of an incidence of genocide.

Examples

 * I don't think there was any overall Reich policy to kill the Jews. If there was, they would have been killed and there would not be now so many millions of survivors. And believe me, I am glad for every survivor that there was.
 * David Irving, The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel — 1988: David Irving.

About
(chronologial order)
 * The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.
 * George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism


 * The perpetrators  of  genocide  dig  up  the  mass  graves,  burn  the  bodies,  try  to  cover  up  the  evidence  and  intimidate  the  witnesses.    They  deny  that  they  committed  any  crimes,  and  often  blame  what  happened  on  the  victims.    They  block  investigations  of  the  crimes,  and  continue  to  govern  until  driven  from  power  by  force,  when  they  flee  into  exile.    There  they  remain  with  impunity,  like  Pol  Pot  or  Idi  Amin,  unless  they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.
 * Gregory Stanton, 1996, quoted in Gordon page 453
 * Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception and half-truths reduce what was to what might have been or perhaps what was not at all."


 * [In] the  act  of  denying  this  historical  truth  [of  the  Holocaust],  the  deniers  denigrate  the  Jewish  people  and  memories  of  historical  occurrences,  suggest  that  those  who  accept  the  truth  of  the  Holocaust  lie,  and  relativize  the  suffering  incurred.    Thus, the act of Holocaust denial is not simply an expression of belief in what did or did not happen historically, given that the Holocaust  has  been  historically  verified.    It  is  an  act  of  vilification that denigrates and harms.
 * Katharine Gelber, quoted in page 454


 * Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941–45, also known as the holocaust (Greek: complete burning) or the Shoah (Hebrew: disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust is omitted.
 * Koenraad Elst. Chapter One – Negationism in General, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam (2002).


 * To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. This is strange, since the historical evidence of what happened is plentiful. Western observers like the US ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, wrote detailed reports about what was being done - including the telling statement of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, that all the Armenians had to perish because 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow'. Western missionaries too wrote harrowing accounts of what they witnessed. Their testimony formed an important part of the wartime report on 'The Treatment of the Armenians' compiled by Viscount Bryce, who had also investigated the German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. It might conceivably be argued that the citizens of Christian powers already - or later to be - hostile to the Turks had an interest in misrepresenting them. The Young Turks themselves insisted that they were merely retaliating against a pro-Russian fifth column. That was also the line taken by the Sultan in his reply to Pope Benedict XV's intercession on behalf of the Armenians. Yet agents of the Turks' own wartime allies gave the lie to these claims. Rafael de Nogales, a South American mercenary who served as Inspector General of the Turkish forces in Armenia, reported that the Governor-General of the province had ordered the local authorities in Adil Javus 'to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over'. A German schoolteacher at Aleppo was appalled by what he saw of the 'extermination of the Armenian nation' and wrote urging his own government to 'put a stop to the brutality'.
 * Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 177


 * The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
 * Sam Harris, "Why Don't I Criticize Israel?" (27 July 2014), Sam Harris.


 * My grandfather’s often-uttered phrase echoes in my ears: "There’s no question the Nazis were evil monsters, but I blame the bystanders." My grandfather felt profoundly betrayed by the people who had a voice and did not use it. He understood the existential evil of the Nazis, but felt most betrayed by the neighbors, the shop keepers and the friends who stood silent. He never accepted that humanity was unwilling to help.
 * Alexi Ashe Meyers according to Opinion: After my grandmother’s ordeal in the Holocaust, I have to speak out against sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 (December 11, 2023)