Denial

Back in January, I was asked by Community Solidarity Stroud District to introduce a showing, for Holocaust Memorial Day, of the film Denial, starring Rachel Weisz, which is based on Deborah Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.

I am sharing the speech I wrote today because today is the day that a group in Stroud decided to try and present an event telling the ‘real truth’ behind Hitler, after an event the night before that would have explored the long-discredited and entirely fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which their poster claimed was ‘a blueprint for the 20th and 21st centuries’.

That today would have been Hitler’s 135th birthday did not go unmentioned by the people proposing these events, who revelled in the association and the timing. Added to this, both events were to be presented by a noted Holocaust denier named John Hamer. There was, understandably, a considerable and furious response to this - you can read more about it, and see the promotional flyer, if you click this link.

The organisers quickly cancelled the two events, and issued a mealy-mouthed and weasel-worded ‘apology’ stating that they regretted that it ‘seemed like’ the events were in any way favourable to fascism. They have since written to the local paper claiming that they seek knowledge and new learning, Truth and Justice, and that anyone calling the fascist rhetoric of their events into question is a member of the Thought Police.

So yes, I am sharing this speech today. It seems the exactly right day to do so, because they are denying the entirely self-evident, and it seems like they will double down and continue to do so until they are blue in the face…

Introduction to Denial, delivered Holocaust Memorial Day 2024

 We live in an age of denial, twenty four years into a century of refutation, in which a growing number of people, overwhelmed by the internet and its maelstrom of ever-increasing amounts of information, disinformation, distortion, clarification, truths and lies are all too often turning away from what we as a species collectively know to be fact.

Increased communication has made the world seem at once much smaller and terrifyingly large, thanks to the multitude of voices on social media shouting and shouting at one another, without any human face to give context to what thoughts, if any, lie behind the screams.

More and more often, frightened, overwhelmed and confused people are allowing themselves to be swayed by carefully curated corruptions of basic truths, seeded amongst straightforward lies and facts freighted with the deep-seated, emotionally manipulative language of propaganda.

More often than not they are listening to tales told by demagogues and populists, or by invisible seeders of falsehoods, dressed in what seems at first like common sense, who make it seem as if the little nuggets of information they dole out are entirely the discovery of the reader, rather than a carefully laid trail of breadcrumbs with designs on the exhausted readers’ emotions, hopes and fears.

In this way, the long-debunked Protocols of the Elders of Zion have found their way back into common parlance. Reintroduced by David Icke 30 years ago, they are now spreading relentlessly, used once again as a rod to beat Jews with, in much the same manner as the Nazis used them. In certain circles, the Holocaust continues to be denied - though these days such denial is more often than not dressed up as ‘having an opinion’ - watching this film, you will understand why that position has shifted a little.

Denial is an important film to watch now because the act of denial has spread beyond the Holocaust; though that atrocity remains the great tentpole of deniers, there is now quite a smorgasbord of things that people are being encouraged to deny. For example, some people will tell you, with an alarming earnestness that brooks no facts, no evidence to the contrary, that climate change cannot be real, because it’s ‘so cold here right now'. They will bring up dubious proofs that have little or no back-up in the scientific community, as has happened with MMR vaccination and more. Others will attempt to deny the call to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter because they believe that they have no power or say themselves.

In America, the presidency could be won once again by arch-denier of all that does not serve him, Donald Trump, despite the exposure of much that lead to the January 6th insurrection he incited and the slew of criminal charges against him and his inner circle. His followers - faithful, afraid, and in a frenzy of denial - believe that the more the state pushes against him, the more he must be telling the truth. They are even denying, now, that Trump et al were involved in any insurrection - all the blame for that is being laid at the door of anti-fa. We swirl in circles upon circles of denial.

There are too many other examples of this all-too-human ability (driven by fear of change, of death, of things that are different, of simply being left behind) to batten down the hatches of the mind and assume that someone else out there is to blame for all your ills. That the people who are different from you can’t be suffering as much as they say they are because they’re getting all the attention. That if you ‘do your own research’, whatever you find must be right.

What the film you are about to watch proves beyond doubt is that if people work together to assiduously research a subject, and they calmly and carefully interrogate the poison of propaganda that is being spread as if it were snake oil medicine, the facts, difficult though they may sometimes be to hear, tell a better, truer story than the ones told by propagandists and bigots.

In a century of refutation, of propaganda, of war, terror and climate change, it is time to stop screaming on the internet and stop denying others a voice. The world is too crowded now to be able to run on tribalism, instinct and fear. It is time to look and listen hard and carefully to people and things and ideas, as the lawyers in this film do - even to those people and things and ideas we loathe - before anything too monumental and unchangeable is decided upon, or anyone or anything is decried, denied or disappeared again.