A Times leader about Radovan Karadzic noted last week: “Every war crimes trial, from the Nuremberg indictment to the arraignment of the Khmer Rouge, has been castigated by small bands of deniers and apologists as ‘victors’ justice’.”

Fraser Nelson, the Editor of The Spectator, recently defended a film that disputed a link between the HIV virus and Aids. He complained of a “fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism”.

The use of “denial” to describe an attitude and “denier” to describe its holder is spreading. These are etymologically sound and useful terms. (“Denialism”, however, is a neologism too far.) In ordinary speech, denial means simply saying that something isn’t so. “Denial” in the sense of refusing to accept an historical or scientific proposition has an intentionally disreputable connotation, because it evokes Holocaust denial. The proposition that the Holocaust is a myth concocted by international Jewry is not debated by historians: it can be advanced only by ignoring or faking evidence. To describe it as Holocaust denial is thus correct usage, because it consists in refusing to accept what is known and demonstrably true.

It is a recent coinage, though. Lucy Dawidowicz, the historian, wrote extensively about Holocaust deniers in the 1980s, yet she didn’t use the term.

Holocaust denial is a distinctively mendacious proposition. But “denial” is rightly applied in other cases where there is no legitimate debate about facts. Deniers are those who refuse to accept the evidence. There are, for example, obscure writers who deny that Dr Karadzic’s forces slaughtered 8,000 Bosniaks at Srebrenica in 1995. That proposition is analogous to Holocaust denial because it uses the same methods. Deniers perversely maintain that if not all the human remains can be located and identified, then the massacre must somehow be mythical.

Denial is not a synonym for heterodoxy. Because some claims fall outside the bounds of genuine debate, it is a valuable term for distinguishing among minority positions and an apt label for the claims of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. To reject the evidence that Aids is a medical condition caused by a virus is that type of position. So is rejection of the evidence of global warming caused by human activities. These claims have costs, in persuading people to reject evidence-based science. No other succinct term describes them as effectively as denial.

thepedant@ thetimes.co.uk

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