Negationism has become nowadays a rather popular word. But its meaning is still covered by darkness; there are too many references
that are reconnected to the term. In the most common of its uses, negationism is meant to be the Holocaust denial. Holocaust deniers are so called "revisionists" because they believe - even without having any certain proof of such belief - that the Nazi violence reports have been widely exagerated by contemporary historians. Some of these deniers even affirm that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate jewish conspiracy to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other people. Some of these interpreters prefer to be called "historical revisionists", instead being marked with any antisemitic title, because the reason of their Holocaust denial is dued to the lack of bright and scientific proves about historical facts; the most common of their statements is about the numbers of victims, compared to the dimensions of the lagers, or to other historical circumstances which are difficult to verify. Academic historians normally blame any revisionist attitude, expecially when the cause is rooted in the methodology of historical research. As some scholar has noted, we cannot be totally sure about the past. Anyway, the lack of scientific demonstrations doesn't allow us to think that history cannot be explained.
The term "negationism" has been used by Mao Tse Tung to depict Khrushchev's process of de-stalinization.
Anyway, we can notice that history has always been written by winners and dominant people. The winner of a war earns the right to establish his own version of truth, as the only one truth. So, we see how the situations process to a selection of the
interpretations, which are to be accepted, which are to be discussed and which are to e refused without any discussion. Karl Mannheim, brilliant sociologist of culture, has written interesting analysis of this cultural phenomenon, which makes us think how close the culture is to the nature.
Famous novel by George Orwell, 1984 shows how influent is the policy of the rulers on vision of history and truth. This american writer imagins a society organized under a global order, where the wars are planned according to economical need, and the same wars are also useful in order to rewrite continuously the history; this constant re-interpretation of history brings to relativism and confusion, and uses the connected popular consciousness as a tool, easy to direct by demagogists.
Marzio Valdambrini