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anyone else) by putting them to death in gas chambers or by killing them through abuse or
neglect." (Shermer & Grobman, Denying History, p. xv)
Genuine historical revisionists are people who work with primary documents and
sources and through these reexamine and reinterpret some historical event. They revise
knowledge about the event on the basis of new sources and new insights applied to existing
sources. They refine the detailed knowledge about events, but seldom deny that the event per se
occurred. It is the modification of history based on new facts or new interpretations of old facts.
Scholars play by the rules of logic and reason. They put for their claims as testable hypotheses,
which others can weigh against evidence and accept or reject in relation to other interpretations.
Holocaust revisionism, on the contrary, is really Holocaust denial. It is pseudohistory,
the denial of the past or rewriting the past for present political or ideological reasons. Such
misuse of history occurs all too frequently, for example, the Japanese textbooks that omit any
discussion of the 1937 "rape of Nanking" in China, or the Afrocentric historians who claim
Aristotle stole his ideas, which became the foundation of Western philosophy, from the library of
Alexandria where Africans had deposited their philosophical works. Never mind the fact that
Nanking was witnessed by many reporters and others, or that the Alexandrian library was
founded after Aristotle the time lived. Ideology determines what is true or false.
The Holocaust deniers constitute a vast, interlocking network. They maintain a strong
presence on the internet and their sites cross-reference one other. This is illustrated by the well-
known story of the high school teacher who had assigned her students to write a term paper using
the internet. One young person chose the Holocaust and wrote a horrible paper denying its
historical validity, having drawn on material from the denier web sites. The teacher had failed to
explain that not everything on the internet can be trusted.
Holocaust denial is a stock in trade of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and Identity
church movements, and one also finds it in black hate groups like Louis Farrakhan's Nation of
Islam, some Afro-Centrist writers, and in Arab anti-Israel rhetoric. The common thread running
through all these groups is anti-Semitism, that is, hatred or dislike of Jews. There is also an
international coterie of deniers, but in many countries, such as Canada, Austria, and Germany,
hate crime laws prevent the open expression of these ideas, either orally, in print, or on the
internet. There are also some deniers who seek respectability and eschew fringegroup sectarians.