"Slavery Denial"

From black prof

"Almost two weeks ago, on February 20th, an Austrian court convicted British “historian” David Irving of the crime of denying the Holocaust and the Nazi use of gas chambers at Auschwitz. The court sentenced Irving to a three-year prison term, and although Irving is appealing, so is the prosecutor: the Austrian’s don’t think the sentence was long enough. [...] The concept of Holocaust denial inherently represents the speech of David Irving as inherently both hateful and flawed, directed at imposing a particular harm. Irving’s speech is thus more than anti-Semitic: it participates in creating a myth of (relative) innocence that removes responsibility from the Austrian government (and people) for their passive or active participate in these terrible acts.

Similarly, slavery- and segregation-denial seeks to create a counter-myth of America, one that reconstructs the South, the Klan, and the Confederate flags as the culture-blind symbols of a distinct region with its own traditions. Slavery- and segregation-denial is an attempt to rewrite history in a manner that minimizes whites’ active or passive participation in the state-sponsored violence that lasted will into the 1960s (some would say much later). (more)