It was the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel who once said, “to forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.”
After nearly a decade and a half working as a foreign correspondent, these words remind me why I continue to work documenting atrocities, crimes that the United Nations vowed would never again happen in our lifetimes, despite the tremendous mental and physical toll it takes to do so. By bearing witness, we remember, and we remember so as never to forget. If one is powerless to prevent these crimes, testimony becomes the only moral choice left.
There remains however a crime even worse than forgetting, and it plagues nearly every facet of modern public and political discourse surrounding documented war crimes and crimes against humanity: Denial.
Today the Russian regime has weaponised denial as a critical component of its full scale war on Ukraine. So too has the Chinese government in its cultural eradication of the Uyghurs of East Turkestan. In the previous decade, the Iranian and Syrian regimes, in league with their Russian allies, denied their industrial-scale slaughter of the Syrian people, even as extensive forensic photographs documenting these crimes (the Caesar photographs) were smuggled out of the country, verified by Human Rights Watch and publicly displayed, including by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. In the decade before that, the Sudanese regime employed denial over its genocide in Darfur. And in the decade before that, the Serbian government did the same in Bosnia.
This horrific cycle of genocide followed by denial continues back through time; the Cambodian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Armenian Genocide. There are so many examples it becomes valid to ask if denial is in and of itself a crucial component of genocide.
But is denial a crucial component for all genocides? Genocide scholars, unsurprisingly, have mixed opinions on this. A book published in 2021 titled Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide? explores these questions at length, but here I would like to highlight the contribution by Armenian-American academic and former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Henry C. Theriault, who argues that denial is not essential to genocide, and that there are both ancient and contemporary examples of perpetrators drawing attention to, and even exaggerating their crimes for the purposes of intimidation. Furthermore, mixing denial with explicit approval for genocide is so common in political discourse that it has spawned a recognisable trope: “It didn’t happen, but they deserved it”.
Theriualt’s argument that denial is a tool that is employed only when it is perceived as an efficacious strategy in the pursuit of a genocide is a reasonable one, but in either case, the rhetorical purpose of these strategies remains to dehumanise the victims of genocide and to justify the genocidal intent of the perpetrators. On the pathology of denial, Theriualt says that all deniers “share a desire that genocide denial be normalized out of an approval of genocide and even a pleasure at demeaning the victims and as a way of reserving the potential of renewed genocide as a threat or future activity.” The logical assumption from this would be that genocide denial, or atrocity revisionism more generally as it pertains to ongoing crimes against humanity that have not yet been classified as genocide, would be perceived as societally unacceptable. But that logical assumption is false, and the examples of this are too numerous to fit in a book, let alone an essay.
On the intention of the denier, American historian, diplomat and author of Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt once summarised part of her legal battle with the British convicted Holocaust denier David Irving by saying, “there are facts, there are opinions and there are lies. And what deniers want to do is take their lies, dress them up as opinions, opinions that should be part of the conversation, and then they encroach on the facts.” Lipstadt appears to agree with Theriualt that the denier’s intention is that of normalisation, to present the act of questioning documented, incontrovertible atrocities as if it were as reasonable as any other type of academic discourse, even when the fallacies underpinning those arguments are as divorced from reality as claiming that the Earth is flat.
This relationship between truth, fiction, and the apologists for crimes against humanity was explored by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt wrote “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” As Arendt correctly highlights, this attitude towards truth and revisionism isn’t confined to Nazis and the fascist far right. Indeed the problems with atrocity denial have also become entrenched and endemic on the far left, and this has been the case at least since the crimes of Josef Stalin. Nor can the liberal centre ground claim to be free from this moral stain – indeed, for as long as ideology has existed, there will be those willing to kill and lie in its name. While it’s true that Holocaust denial does now carry a social stigma in many western liberal democracies, even being designated a criminal offence in some European countries, the same cannot be said of other war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocides, even when those crimes are among the most well-documented in human history. And even with the Holocaust-specific stigma, Holocaust deniers like David Irving have still at times managed to attain positions of relative prominence and supposed academic credibility. Irving himself was once regarded, in Britain at least, as a respected World War II historian, even while he continued to claim that Auschwitz had no gas chambers. One is left wondering what his reputation would be today if he had not famously lost his libel case against Ambassador Lipstadt.
Writing in the New York Times in 2019, Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon said, “any survivor of genocide will tell you that disbelieving or dismissing their experience is a continuation of genocide.” Hemon was responding to the Austrian author and Bosnian Genocide-denier Peter Handke’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature that same year, whom Hemon referred to as “the Bob Dylan of genocide apologists.” The veneration of Handke by the Nobel committee not only reinforces the impunity of the genocide denier, but as Hemon said, serves as a continuation of the Serbian genocide of Bosniaks.
Unfortunately the Nobel committee is not the only institution mired in the disgrace of genocide denial. In fact, atrocity revisionism in general has become an endemic problem in political discourse, engineered largely by the regimes culpable for these crimes, but tolerated and enabled by the apathy of the establishment. I will come back to this, but I feel I should provide the reader with some context as to why this issue is so important to me.
My personal experience with atrocity revisionism as a journalist is a deeply personal one, and one that radically changed the course of my career. I first knew I wanted to be a war reporter when I was just a child, watching my uncle Philip Howarth report from Lebanon for the BBC during the civil war. I don’t think many children are fortunate enough to have already decided the paths their careers would take before the age of 10, but I honestly couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life.
As I approached the industry with an initially unshakeable idealism, I did not have any idea how much denialism would impact my career. While I was aware of the Bosnian Genocide revisionists, I was too young to have experienced their work firsthand. But it would not be long before I encountered denialism myself, albeit concerning the Middle East and not the Balkans. At first I wasn’t prepared for the reality of this job. But now that I understand the reality, I am not prepared to walk away from the fight. If conflict journalism isn’t a direct opponent of atrocity denial, then it is nothing but war tourism and propaganda. If we are not duty-bound to fight for the truth to be heard, then we have no business reporting that truth in the first place. These stories are only entrusted to us so we can do them justice, and we do them no justice if we do not confront denial.
War crimes denial has unfortunately become a subject I have learned a great deal about over the course of my journalistic career. It touches on conflicts that have no relation to each other besides the zealotry of the revisionists. I have published extensively on the subject, but this was never by design, and I would have been horrified to learn as a student that I would dedicate so much of my career fighting against atrocity denial.
It is no longer enough to simply report the truth. Journalists these days are forced to compete with fantasists and propagandists in the information space, on platforms where the quality of information is considered significantly less important than its propensity to go viral. As this phenomenon continues to degrade public discourse, the money spent on quality journalism is in decline, as is the media industry in general. All of which is more good news for authoritarian states looking to flood the internet with disinformation and lies.
I grew up with a reverence for war journalists, for the bravery they displayed, for their tireless pursuit of speaking truth to power, even at the cost of their lives. I watched my heroes like Kate Adie, Marie Colvin, Robert Fisk and James Nachtwey put themselves in harm’s way to bear witness to the very worst acts of humanity, to provide a voice for the voiceless, and to testify before history so that no crime against humanity could ever be forgotten.
It was one of these heroes that first drew me into this struggle. As a fledgling intern at the now-shuttered Lebanese English language newspaper The Daily Star, I remember going along with several young colleagues of mine to see Robert Fisk give a speech at the Lebanese American University in 2010. This was my first time seeing him in the flesh and I was excited to hear what he had to say. “The Middle East is not a football match,” he said. “It’s a bloody tragedy, and the journalists have a responsibility to be on the side of those who suffer.”
I agreed – and still agree – wholeheartedly with that statement. But it was difficult for me to reconcile this Robert Fisk – the Robert Fisk of Pity The Nation, which I believed when I first read it to be the most comprehensive western account of the civil war that had destroyed my father’s home country – with the Robert Fisk I would later come to know. Because in his writing, Fisk often described a fictional world based only loosely on reality.
I will lay just a handful of examples out to demonstrate. Firstly, despite what was written in some obituaries, even after 40 years of living in the Middle East, Robert Fisk could not speak Arabic. He lacked even knowledge of basic words like “ummah” (community/nation), which was apparent from his catastrophic mistranslation of the Ba’athist slogan “Ummah Arabiya Wahida” as “the Mother of one Arab People”, instead of “One Arab Nation”.
Following Fisk’s death, Syrian journalist Asser Khattab attempted to set the record straight by writing a furious piece on Fisk’s mistruths for the Arabic magazine Raseef22. In it Khattab gave a first hand account of Fisk making stuff up, focusing particular attention on an encounter with his regime-minder/translator on a visit to Homs. Khattab says “Fisk spoke of places we did not visit, and facts we did not witness, and his interview with officials, including those in the governorate, was full of long, eloquent and expressive phrases that I have no idea where they had come from.”
Another story, told by former Telegraph correspondent, Francis Harris, demonstrates just how brazen Fisk was with his stories. “When I was in Zagreb, the foreign desk sent me his piece from rural Croatia,” Harris said. “I said that’s impossible. No one could do that journey in a day, and I’d seen him at breakfast and dinner. A decade later, when I was on the foreign desk, an angry young correspondent said the same — that Fisk’s trip from Kabul to Kandahar was impossible. Journalists had died trying to drive down that road. And I told him what my deputy foreign editor had told me in ’91: ‘Sorry old son, you’ve been Fisked’.”
As the Assad regime’s counter-revolutionary violence brutalised Syrians from 2011 on, Fisk conducted fawning interviews with such regime figures as foreign minister Walid Muallem. Instead of asking searching questions, he took their propaganda claims at face value. Then, after the August 2012 massacre of around 700 people in Daraya, a suburb west of Damascus, Fisk’s career arrived at its lowest point. During the American-British occupation of Iraq, Fisk had written powerfully against ‘embedded journalism’, when journalists accompanied occupation forces and questioned Iraqis in their presence, but in 2012 Fisk entered Daraya with the Assad regime forces who had just perpetrated the massacre and then proceeded to question survivors in their presence. Of course the story he then wrote explained the innocence of the perpetrators. Fisk did not meet any member of the opposition in Daraya, and did not meet any civilian at all except in the presence of armed regime minders. The respected war correspondent Janine di Giovanni went into Daraya with civilians at the same time, however, and uncovered the truth of the regime assault on a rebellious civilian community.
Fisk could not have duped an entire industry for so long without the complicity of his editors and publishers. When I published my obituary of Fisk in The Critic, a small British conservative magazine, I did not expect it to be so widely shared by my peers. As I wrote there, “the frequency with which falsehoods can be found in Fisk’s work wasn’t so much an open secret as a widely shared joke.” Now that Fisk was dead, other journalists finally felt free to share their own stories of Fisk’s litany of distortions, half-truths and passed-on propaganda. Some of his more sympathetic peers questioned why I had waited until his death to publish this account, despite the fact that I had been highlighting Fisk’s record for many years. The truth is that very few people cared enough to speak out. Something could have been done, and other than the British satirical magazine Private Eye, very few acted to challenge Fisk’s atrocity revisionism. Fisk’s newspaper, The Independent, even quietly moved his copy to the Opinion section, probably because they were tired of the scrutiny his articles were increasingly put under in the latter stages of his career.
Fisk’s reporting in Syria was, for me, as much a continuation of the Assad regime’s crimes against humanity as those the Bosnian Genocide-revisionists had committed against Bosniaks in the nineties. His denial of massacres, chemical weapons attacks, and the brutalisation of Syria’s civilian population discredits his entire career. Fisk proved that his word could not be trusted, thus undermining his role as a journalist. But like the Pulitzer Prize winner, Holodomor-denier and Stalin-apologist Walter Duranty before him, Fisk’s accolades remain. Even in death there has been no real reckoning with his legacy.
As a reporter learning the truth about one of my former idols, I was crestfallen. Syria had opened my eyes to denialism, and once my eyes were open, I was shocked to start seeing it in places I had never even questioned before.
Perhaps I am fortunate that one of the first major lessons I learned as a journalist was that I could not simply trust the word even of those journalists I had grown up admiring. It is a lesson I learned young, and it is probably what spurred my interest during the early 2010s in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), which employs forensic and open source methods (such as user generated content, for example videos uploaded from crime scenes) to verify and confirm war crimes. Learning about the open source method was a liberating experience. I could now acquire the skills necessary to accurately and effectively counter the fabrications and distortions of charlatans.
With these new skills, journalists were able to disprove war crimes denial using forensic evidence, evidence that can be peer-reviewed and widely corroborated. OSINT didn’t just change the game, it provided journalists and human rights activists with the tools to confront the evil of denialism without the need for hugely complicated and expensive on-the-ground investigations. These still have an important role to play in journalism, but OSINT revolutionised the entire industry approach to documenting war crimes.
The rise of social media and video technology allowed unprecedented levels of global communication, meaning that war crimes could be documented by anybody who had a mobile phone, and could be uploaded online and on the same day broadcast to the entire world, something that previous generations could only achieve by hugely expensive broadcast news operations. This was a new era for journalism. We could now cover conflicts in new ways, in real time, thanks to waves of user generated content being uploaded to the internet every day.
But there was a counterweight. This unprecedented flow of information would be immediately assaulted by an equally unprecedented tech-savvy approach to atrocity denial. The growth of social media provided state sponsored atrocity revisionism a new platform, a Radio-Television Serbia but with the power to be broadcast directly into every home with a computer and an internet connection. At certain points, reporting the truth of the systematic war crimes taking place in Syria became in and of itself a radical act. Those who documented the atrocities the Assad regime inflicted on Syrian civilians were targeted by a vast, state-sponsored network of deniers, supported by the extensive influence operation of the Russian Ministry of Information, itself masquerading as a state broadcaster. The purpose was the same as ever – to pump out non-stop disinformation intended to dismiss, distort, distract, dismay and divide – only in a medium that could now be streamed directly to any phone in the world, and not just printed on the pages of Pravda.
Russia was bombing hospitals, and enabling the Assad regime to rain chemical weapons on utterly defenceless civilians in Douma and Khan Sheikhoun, by actively denying that any of this was taking place. Next they claimed that if it was taking place, it was all staged. And that if it wasn’t staged, the victims were in fact the perpetrators. It did not matter how absurd the lie was, or how many times the story changed to fit a new narrative, all that mattered was the denial, and the dehumanisation of the victims.
These claims were further amplified by a chorus of journalists and academics, some with immense influence and legitimacy. Not only Fisk but several important figures on both left and right have supported propaganda absolving the Assad regime of using chemical weapons. Not one of them has suffered a single social or career consequence. In fact, you will find very little discussion of this in the mainstream press. There are seemingly very few people in positions of power or influence who think anyone should face accountability or even scrutiny over this issue.
Syria is not a unique example, but having spent so many years of my career covering the Syrian Revolution and the civil war that followed, it is the story that opened my eyes to the problem of denial, and how entrenched denial has become within our digital information ecosystem.
One of the other things I learned was that atrocity revisionists are rarely interested in whitewashing only one set of crimes. It was no accident that many of the same figures who relayed Russian and Assadist denialist narratives had also denied the Bosnian genocide, and faced no professional consequences for that denial, even after the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia convicted multiple Serbian war criminals for the crime of genocide. Many of these figures engaged in similar denialism over China’s systematic erasure of its Uyghur population. Is it any surprise that so many of those involved in Bosnian genocide denial, who would then go on to defend Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang, and who would then further engage in Syrian chemical weapons revisionism, have been proven so catastrophically wrong on Ukraine too?
There is a pathology to the atrocity denier, one that is rewarded and reinforced by the current political and media climate, and which thrives further thanks to the increasing polarisation of political discourse in western liberal democracies. Now is a good time to be in the state propaganda business. But that is also what makes the fight against this endemic problem so important. To lose this information war is unthinkable. If nobody speaks out for the victims, if the perpetrators are continually granted impunity, such crimes against humanity will surely happen again.
It’s hard to think of any organisation that has failed to achieve its founding purpose more than the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention. Nevertheless, the UNOGP has recognised the need to combat denialism. It’s difficult to find fault with the conclusions of its 2022 report “Combating Holocaust and Genocide Denial: Protecting Survivors, Preserving Memory, and Promoting Prevention”, which recommend that “UN actors, civil society, and social media companies should develop proactive strategies to advance education about the Holocaust and other atrocity crimes and about the dangers of denial and distortion online.”
This is a noble goal, and one that I think would start to have some effect on atrocity denial within the digital space at least. The problem is that UN actors, civil society and social media companies don’t consider denial a priority. Many can barely conceive of it as a serious problem, one that has lasting political, social, cultural and psychological ramifications that impact far beyond just the communities targeted by denial.
Whenever this topic is discussed, legitimate discussions around freedom of speech naturally arise. But there is no such thing as an inalienable right to say whatever you want on a public platform free from consequence, and most democracies have some form of hate speech legislation that criminalises incitement. What is needed is a broader understanding of atrocity denial and how it can and frequently does intersect and interact with hate speech.
Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, much more attention has been paid to Russia’s state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. Moscow’s ability to deny the atrocities Russian forces have committed against Ukrainian civilians has been severely hampered by a newly robust approach to Russian state media in the countries allied to Ukraine. It should not have taken the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II for this to have taken place. Russian propaganda networks have been actively poisoning political discourse in the west for nearly two decades now. Had the west properly valued Syrian (and Georgian, and Chechen) life, it wouldn’t have taken this long.
While Russia’s active propaganda measures have faltered in the last 18 months or so, they are far from defeated, and they are far from the only actor in this space. Of even more concern is the instability of the political systems in the liberal democracies that must be relied on to push back against this effort. Donald Trump’s rise to power followed by his failed putsch present a serious threat not only to political and media discourse in the United States, but also to the future of its democracy.
There is a relentless information war taking place in our societies. We are at the mercy of powerful forces that have proven time and time again that truth is of little consequence to them. Many people are struggling with wage stagnation and inflation, and most do not have the time or media literacy to sift through the vast amounts of information with which they are constantly bombarded, particularly when the information concerns conflicts that don’t directly impact their lives or the lives of their loved ones. Winning this war for truth may be an insurmountable task.
But losing it? That would be the same as killing the victims twice. Therefore, it falls to us to bear witness, and to fight to make sure this witnessing is heard.