Holocaust denial: Encyclopedia II - Holocaust denial - Other genocide denials

Holocaust denial - Other genocide denials

Other acts of genocide and atrocity have met similar attempts to deny, to minimize, or to hush up. The list of these acts is extensive and proof is often difficult to obtain, either because governments are involved in the denial or because there is debate on whether the occurred atrocities are genocide or not. The toll of the Great Chinese Famine caused by the government of Mao was higher than the toll of the Second World War in China but could only be proved some decades later with demographic evidence. Some other examples are:

• the Nanjing Massacre (1937) by the Japanese army, which many Japanese politicians, such as Ishihara Shintaro, have denied happened;
• Japanese concentration camps for Dutch and other Western citizens during the 1940s were well exposed in the West but are almost completely unknown within Japan;
• The Armenian Genocide by Turkey is denied by the Turkish government. Although some Turkish writers are being persecuted for going against the state's official standpoint concerning the massacre, the situation might change complexion in the coming years, mainly as a result of Turkey's attempt to join the European Union;
• The Ustasha genocide by Croats, who killed hundreds of thousnd of Serbs in WWII in Jasenovac and other places, was denied by Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, a revisionist historian, and by a many people in present day Croatia.
• The mass-killings organized by the Khmer Rouge in Democratic Kampuchea (today Cambodia), now almost universally regarded as genocide, were sometimes denied or minimized by contemporary commentators, primarily on the political left. Critics of Noam Chomsky accuse him of doing so (1, 2). Chomsky's position was based largely on his prior objections to the Khmer Rouge's opponents, whom he considered imperialists (see argumentum ad hominem). Chomsky now refers to what happened in Cambodia as a genocide (see Criticism of Noam Chomsky).
• Australian historian Keith Windshuttle has challenged the evidence and scholarship that suggested there was systematic genocide of Tasmania's indigenous population.
• The Bosnian Genocide by Bosnian Serbs is still denied by most Serbs and others although it has gained acceptance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) through the court case entitled Prosecutor vs Krstic (see Srebrenica Massacre).
• The Ukrainian Famine, in which 5-10 million people starved to death due to the political situation in the USSR which exported the harvested grain for economical gains, is generally accepted as a genocide but is denied by some, mostly former communists.
• The Highland Clearances, was an early act ethnic cleansing which could be considered as genocide although it's still denied by many, notably in England. Although the Clearances are known, the issue has largely sunk into oblivion today.

Genocide Watch [18] lists denial as the eighth and final stage of a genocide development. Sometimes the motivation for genocide denial is to avoid disturbing opinions, and sometimes it is strictly nationalist, or ideological. Ward Churchill, a scholar and activist in the area of Native American studies, asserts that the concept of holocaust denial applies to minimization of the significance of attempted extermination of other victims of the Nazi holocaust such as Gypsies and to marginalization of other "holocausts" such as the near elimination of Native Americans.

The Holocaust Research Center director Dr. William Shulman described the denial "…as if these people were killed twice." [19]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Other genocide denials", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki