title: Ornithology

text: In the 17th century, Francis Willughby (1635–1672) and John Ray (1627–1705) came up with the first major system of bird classification that was based on function and morphology rather than on form or behaviour. Willughby's "Ornithologiae libri tres" (1676) completed by John Ray is sometimes considered to mark the beginning of scientific ornithology. Ray also worked on "Ornithologia", which was published posthumously in 1713 as "Synopsis methodica avium et piscium". The earliest list of British birds, "Pinax Rerum Naturalium Britannicarum", was written by Christopher Merrett in 1667, but authors such as John Ray considered it of little value. Ray did, however, value the expertise of the naturalist Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), who not only answered his queries on ornithological identification and nomenclature, but also those of Willoughby and Merrett in letter correspondence. Browne himself in his lifetime kept an eagle, owl, cormorant, bittern, and ostrich, penned a tract on falconry, and introduced the words "incubation" and "oviparous" into the English language.


title: Ornithology

text: Towards the late 18th century, Mathurin Jacques Brisson (1723–1806) and Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) began new works on birds. Brisson produced a six-volume work "Ornithologie" in 1760 and Buffon's included nine volumes (volumes 16–24) on birds "Histoire naturelle des oiseaux" (1770–1785) in his work on science "Histoire naturelle générale et particulière" (1749–1804). Jacob Temminck sponsored François Le Vaillant [1753–1824] to collect bird specimens in Southern Africa and Le Vaillant's six-volume "Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique" (1796–1808) included many non-African birds. His other bird books produced in collaboration with the artist Barraband are considered among the most valuable illustrated guides ever produced. Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot (1748–1831) spent 10 years studying North American birds and wrote the "Histoire naturelle des oiseaux de l'Amerique septentrionale" (1807–1808?). Vieillot pioneered in the use of life histories and habits in classification. Alexander Wilson composed a nine-volume work, "American Ornithology", published 1808-1814, which is the first such record of North American birds, significantly antedating Audubon. In the early 19th century, Lewis and Clark studied and identified many birds in the western United States. John James Audubon, born in 1785, observed and painted birds in France and later in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. From 1827 to 1838, Audubon published "The Birds of America", which was engraved by Robert Havell Sr. and his son Robert Havell Jr. Containing 435 engravings, it is often regarded as the greatest ornithological work in history.


title: Ornithology

text: The emergence of ornithology as a scientific discipline began in the 18th century, when Mark Catesby published his two-volume "Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands", a landmark work which included 220 hand-painted engravings and was the basis for many of the species Carl Linnaeus described in the 1758 "Systema Naturae". Linnaeus' work revolutionised bird taxonomy by assigning every species a binomial name, categorising them into different genera. However, ornithology did not emerge as a specialised science until the Victorian era—with the popularization of natural history, and the collection of natural objects such as bird eggs and skins. This specialization led to the formation in Britain of the British Ornithologists' Union in 1858. In 1859, the members founded its journal "The Ibis". The sudden spurt in ornithology was also due in part to colonialism. At 100 years later, in 1959, R. E. Moreau noted that ornithology in this period was preoccupied with the geographical distributions of various species of birds.


title: Ornithology

text: The bird collectors of the Victorian era observed the variations in bird forms and habits across geographic regions, noting local specialization and variation in widespread species. The collections of museums and private collectors grew with contributions from various parts of the world. The naming of species with binomials and the organization of birds into groups based on their similarities became the main work of museum specialists. The variations in widespread birds across geographical regions caused the introduction of trinomial names.


title: Ornithology

text: The search for patterns in the variations of birds was attempted by many. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), his student Johann Baptist von Spix (1781–1826), and several others believed that a hidden and innate mathematical order existed in the forms of birds. They believed that a "natural" classification was available and superior to "artificial" ones. A particularly popular idea was the Quinarian system popularised by Nicholas Aylward Vigors (1785–1840), William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865), William Swainson, and others. The idea was that nature followed a "rule of five" with five groups nested hierarchically. Some had attempted a rule of four, but Johann Jakob Kaup (1803–1873) insisted that the number five was special, noting that other natural entities such as the senses also came in fives. He followed this idea and demonstrated his view of the order within the crow family. Where he failed to find five genera, he left a blank insisting that a new genus would be found to fill these gaps. These ideas were replaced by more complex "maps" of affinities in works by Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alfred Russel Wallace. A major advance was made by Max Fürbringer in 1888, who established a comprehensive phylogeny of birds based on anatomy, morphology, distribution, and biology. This was developed further by Hans Gadow and others.


title: Ornithology

text: The Galapagos finches were especially influential in the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. His contemporary Alfred Russel Wallace also noted these variations and the geographical separations between different forms leading to the study of biogeography. Wallace was influenced by the work of Philip Lutley Sclater on the distribution patterns of birds.


title: Ornithology

text: For Darwin, the problem was how species arose from a common ancestor, but he did not attempt to find rules for delineation of species. The species problem was tackled by the ornithologist Ernst Mayr, who was able to demonstrate that geographical isolation and the accumulation of genetic differences led to the splitting of species.


title: Ornithology

text: Early ornithologists were preoccupied with matters of species identification. Only systematics counted as true science and field studies were considered inferior through much of the 19th century. In 1901, Robert Ridgway wrote in the introduction to "The Birds of North and Middle America" that:


title: Ornithology

text: This early idea that the study of living birds was merely recreation held sway until ecological theories became the predominant focus of ornithological studies. The study of birds in their habitats was particularly advanced in Germany with bird ringing stations established as early as 1903. By the 1920s, the "Journal für Ornithologie" included many papers on the behaviour, ecology, anatomy, and physiology, many written by Erwin Stresemann. Stresemann changed the editorial policy of the journal, leading both to a unification of field and laboratory studies and a shift of research from museums to universities. Ornithology in the United States continued to be dominated by museum studies of morphological variations, species identities, and geographic distributions, until it was influenced by Stresemann's student Ernst Mayr. In Britain, some of the earliest ornithological works that used the word ecology appeared in 1915. "The Ibis", however, resisted the introduction of these new methods of study, and no paper on ecology appeared until 1943. The work of David Lack on population ecology was pioneering. Newer quantitative approaches were introduced for the study of ecology and behaviour, and this was not readily accepted. For instance, Claud Ticehurst wrote:


title: Ornithology

text: David Lack's studies on population ecology sought to find the processes involved in the regulation of population based on the evolution of optimal clutch sizes. He concluded that population was regulated primarily by density-dependent controls, and also suggested that natural selection produces life-history traits that maximize the fitness of individuals. Others, such as Wynne-Edwards, interpreted population regulation as a mechanism that aided the "species" rather than individuals. This led to widespread and sometimes bitter debate on what constituted the "unit of selection". Lack also pioneered the use of many new tools for ornithological research, including the idea of using radar to study bird migration.


title: Ornithology

text: Birds were also widely used in studies of the niche hypothesis and Georgii Gause's competitive exclusion principle. Work on resource partitioning and the structuring of bird communities through competition were made by Robert MacArthur. Patterns of biodiversity also became a topic of interest. Work on the relationship of the number of species to area and its application in the study of island biogeography was pioneered by E. O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur. These studies led to the development of the discipline of landscape ecology.


title: Ornithology

text: John Hurrell Crook studied the behaviour of weaverbirds and demonstrated the links between ecological conditions, behaviour, and social systems. Principles from economics were introduced to the study of biology by Jerram L. Brown in his work on explaining territorial behaviour. This led to more studies of behaviour that made use of cost-benefit analyses. The rising interest in sociobiology also led to a spurt of bird studies in this area.


title: Ornithology

text: The study of imprinting behaviour in ducks and geese by Konrad Lorenz and the studies of instinct in herring gulls by Nicolaas Tinbergen led to the establishment of the field of ethology. The study of learning became an area of interest and the study of bird songs has been a model for studies in neuroethology. The study of hormones and physiology in the control of behaviour has also been aided by bird models. These have helped in finding the proximate causes of circadian and seasonal cycles. Studies on migration have attempted to answer questions on the evolution of migration, orientation, and navigation.


title: Ornithology

text: The growth of genetics and the rise of molecular biology led to the application of the gene-centered view of evolution to explain avian phenomena. Studies on kinship and altruism, such as helpers, became of particular interest. The idea of inclusive fitness was used to interpret observations on behaviour and life history, and birds were widely used models for testing hypotheses based on theories postulated by W. D. Hamilton and others.


title: Ornithology

text: The new tools of molecular biology changed the study of bird systematics, which changed from being based on phenotype to the underlying genotype. The use of techniques such as DNA-DNA hybridization to study evolutionary relationships was pioneered by Charles Sibley and Jon Edward Ahlquist, resulting in what is called the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy. These early techniques have been replaced by newer ones based on mitochondrial DNA sequences and molecular phylogenetics approaches that make use of computational procedures for sequence alignment, construction of phylogenetic trees, and calibration of molecular clocks to infer evolutionary relationships. Molecular techniques are also widely used in studies of avian population biology and ecology.


title: Ornithology

text: The use of field glasses or telescopes for bird observation began in the 1820s and 1830s, with pioneers such as J. Dovaston (who also pioneered in the use of bird feeders), but instruction manuals did not begin to insist on the use of optical aids such as "a first-class telescope" or "field glass" until the 1880s.


title: Ornithology

text: The rise of field guides for the identification of birds was another major innovation. The early guides such as those of Thomas Bewick (two volumes) and William Yarrell (three volumes) were cumbersome, and mainly focused on identifying specimens in the hand. The earliest of the new generation of field guides was prepared by Florence Merriam, sister of Clinton Hart Merriam, the mammalogist. This was published in 1887 in a series "Hints to Audubon Workers:Fifty Birds and How to Know Them" in Grinnell's "Audubon Magazine". These were followed by new field guides,


title: Ornithology

text: from the pioneering illustrated handbooks of Frank Chapman (ornithologist) to the classic "Field Guide to the Birds" by Roger Tory Peterson in 1934, including the "Birds from the West Indies" published in 1936 by Dr James Bond (ornithologist) - the same who inspired the amateur ornithologist Ian Fleming in naming his immortal literary spy.


title: Ornithology

text: The interest in birdwatching grew in popularity in many parts of the world, and the possibility for amateurs to contribute to biological studies was soon realized. As early as 1916, Julian Huxley wrote a two-part article in "The Auk", noting the tensions between amateurs and professionals, and suggested the possibility that the "vast army of bird lovers and bird watchers could begin providing the data scientists needed to address the fundamental problems of biology." The amateur ornithologist Harold F. Mayfield noted that the field was also funded by non-professionals. He noted that in 1975, 12% of the papers in American ornithology journals were written by persons who were not employed in biology related work.


title: Ornithology

text: Organizations were started in many countries, and these grew rapidly in membership, most notable among them being the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) in Britain and the Audubon Society in the US, which started in 1885. Both these organizations were started with the primary objective of conservation. The RSPB, born in 1889, grew from a small Croydon-based group of women, including Eliza Phillips, Etta Lemon, Catherine Hall and Hannah Poland. Calling themselves the "Fur, Fin, and Feather Folk", the group met regularly and took a pledge "to refrain from wearing the feathers of any birds not killed for the purpose of food, the ostrich only exempted." The organization did not allow men as members initially, avenging a policy of the British Ornithologists' Union to keep out women. Unlike the RSPB, which was primarily conservation oriented, the British Trust for Ornithology was started in 1933 with the aim of advancing ornithological research. Members were often involved in collaborative ornithological projects. These projects have resulted in atlases which detail the distribution of bird species across Britain. In Canada, citizen scientist Elsie Cassels studied migratory birds and was involved in establishing Gaetz Lakes bird sanctuary. In the United States, the Breeding Bird Surveys, conducted by the US Geological Survey, have also produced atlases with information on breeding densities and changes in the density and distribution over time. Other volunteer collaborative ornithology projects were subsequently established in other parts of the world.


title: Ornithology

text: The tools and techniques of ornithology are varied, and new inventions and approaches are quickly incorporated. The techniques may be broadly dealt under the categories of those that are applicable to specimens and those that are used in the field, but the classification is rough and many analysis techniques are usable both in the laboratory and field or may require a combination of field and laboratory techniques.


title: Ornithology

text: The earliest approaches to modern bird study involved the collection of eggs, a practice known as oology. While collecting became a pastime for many amateurs, the labels associated with these early egg collections made them unreliable for the serious study of bird breeding. To preserve eggs, a tiny hole was made and the contents extracted. This technique became standard with the invention of the blow drill around 1830. Egg collection is no longer popular; however, historic museum collections have been of value in determining the effects of pesticides such as DDT on physiology. Museum bird collections continue to act as a resource for taxonomic studies.


title: Ornithology

text: The use of bird skins to document species has been a standard part of systematic ornithology. Bird skins are prepared by retaining the key bones of the wings, legs, and skull along with the skin and feathers. In the past, they were treated with arsenic to prevent fungal and insect (mostly dermestid) attack. Arsenic, being toxic, was replaced by less-toxic borax. Amateur and professional collectors became familiar with these skinning techniques and started sending in their skins to museums, some of them from distant locations. This led to the formation of huge collections of bird skins in museums in Europe and North America. Many private collections were also formed. These became references for comparison of species, and the ornithologists at these museums were able to compare species from different locations, often places that they themselves never visited. Morphometrics of these skins, particularly the lengths of the tarsus, bill, tail, and wing became important in the descriptions of bird species. These skin collections have been used in more recent times for studies on molecular phylogenetics by the extraction of ancient DNA. The importance of type specimens in the description of species make skin collections a vital resource for systematic ornithology. However, with the rise of molecular techniques, establishing the taxonomic status of new discoveries, such as the Bulo Burti boubou ("Laniarius liberatus", no longer a valid species) and the Bugun liocichla ("Liocichla bugunorum"), using blood, DNA and feather samples as the holotype material, has now become possible.


title: Ornithology

text: Other methods of preservation include the storage of specimens in spirit. Such wet specimens have special value in physiological and anatomical study, apart from providing better quality of DNA for molecular studies. Freeze drying of specimens is another technique that has the advantage of preserving stomach contents and anatomy, although it tends to shrink, making it less reliable for morphometrics.


title: Ornithology

text: The study of birds in the field was helped enormously by improvements in optics. Photography made it possible to document birds in the field with great accuracy. High-power spotting scopes today allow observers to detect minute morphological differences that were earlier possible only by examination of the specimen "in the hand".


title: Ornithology

text: The capture and marking of birds enable detailed studies of life history. Techniques for capturing birds are varied and include the use of bird liming for perching birds, mist nets for woodland birds, cannon netting for open-area flocking birds, the "bal-chatri" trap for raptors, decoys and funnel traps for water birds.


title: Ornithology

text: The bird in the hand may be examined and measurements can be made, including standard lengths and weights. Feather moult and skull ossification provide indications of age and health. Sex can be determined by examination of anatomy in some sexually nondimorphic species. Blood samples may be drawn to determine hormonal conditions in studies of physiology, identify DNA markers for studying genetics and kinship in studies of breeding biology and phylogeography. Blood may also be used to identify pathogens and arthropod-borne viruses. Ectoparasites may be collected for studies of coevolution and zoonoses. In many cryptic species, measurements (such as the relative lengths of wing feathers in warblers) are vital in establishing identity. Captured birds are often marked for future recognition. Rings or bands provide long-lasting identification, but require capture for the information on them to be read. Field-identifiable marks such as coloured bands, wing tags, or dyes enable short-term studies where individual identification is required. Mark and recapture techniques make demographic studies possible. Ringing has traditionally been used in the study of migration. In recent times, satellite transmitters provide the ability to track migrating birds in near-real time.


title: Ornithology

text: Techniques for estimating population density include point counts, transects, and territory mapping. Observations are made in the field using carefully designed protocols and the data may be analysed to estimate bird diversity, relative abundance, or absolute population densities. These methods may be used repeatedly over large timespans to monitor changes in the environment. Camera traps have been found to be a useful tool for the detection and documentation of elusive species, nest predators and in the quantitative analysis of frugivory, seed dispersal and behaviour.


title: Ornithology

text: Many aspects of bird biology are difficult to study in the field. These include the study of behavioural and physiological changes that require a long duration of access to the bird. Nondestructive samples of blood or feathers taken during field studies may be studied in the laboratory. For instance, the variation in the ratios of stable hydrogen isotopes across latitudes makes establishing the origins of migrant birds possible using mass spectrometric analysis of feather samples. These techniques can be used in combination with other techniques such as ringing.


title: Ornithology

text: The first attenuated vaccine developed by Louis Pasteur, for fowl cholera, was tested on poultry in 1878. Anti-malarials were tested on birds which harbour avian-malarias. Poultry continues to be used as a model for many studies in non-mammalian immunology.


title: Ornithology

text: Studies in bird behaviour include the use of tamed and trained birds in captivity. Studies on bird intelligence and song learning have been largely laboratory-based. Field researchers may make use of a wide range of techniques such as the use of dummy owls to elicit mobbing behaviour, and dummy males or the use of call playback to elicit territorial behaviour and thereby to establish the boundaries of bird territories. Studies of bird migration including aspects of navigation, orientation, and physiology are often studied using captive birds in special cages that record their activities. The Emlen funnel, for instance, makes use of a cage with an inkpad at the centre and a conical floor where the ink marks can be counted to identify the direction in which the bird attempts to fly. The funnel can have a transparent top and visible cues such as the direction of sunlight may be controlled using mirrors or the positions of the stars simulated in a planetarium.


title: Ornithology

text: The entire genome of the domestic fowl ("Gallus gallus") was sequenced in 2004, and was followed in 2008 by the genome of the zebra finch ("Taeniopygia guttata"). Such whole-genome sequencing projects allow for studies on evolutionary processes involved in speciation. Associations between the expression of genes and behaviour may be studied using candidate genes. Variations in the exploratory behaviour of great tits ("Parus major") have been found to be linked with a gene orthologous to the human gene "DRD4" (Dopamine receptor D4) which is known to be associated with novelty-seeking behaviour. The role of gene expression in developmental differences and morphological variations have been studied in Darwin's finches. The difference in the expression of "Bmp4" have been shown to be associated with changes in the growth and shape of the beak.


title: Ornithology

text: The chicken has long been a model organism for studying vertebrate developmental biology. As the embryo is readily accessible, its development can be easily followed (unlike mice). This also allows the use of electroporation for studying the effect of adding or silencing a gene. Other tools for perturbing their genetic makeup are chicken embryonic stem cells and viral vectors.


title: Ornithology

text: With the widespread interest in birds, use of a large number of people to work on collaborative ornithological projects that cover large geographic scales has been possible. These citizen science projects include nationwide projects such as the Christmas Bird Count, Backyard Bird Count, the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the Canadian EPOQ or regional projects such as the Asian Waterfowl Census and Spring Alive in Europe. These projects help to identify distributions of birds, their population densities and changes over time, arrival and departure dates of migration, breeding seasonality, and even population genetics. The results of many of these projects are published as bird atlases. Studies of migration using bird ringing or colour marking often involve the cooperation of people and organizations in different countries.


title: Ornithology

text: Wild birds impact many human activities, while domesticated birds are important sources of eggs, meat, feathers, and other products. Applied and economic ornithology aim to reduce the ill effects of problem birds and enhance gains from beneficial species.


title: Ornithology

text: The role of some species of birds as pests has been well known, particularly in agriculture. Granivorous birds such as the queleas in Africa are among the most numerous birds in the world, and foraging flocks can cause devastation. Many insectivorous birds are also noted as beneficial in agriculture. Many early studies on the benefits or damages caused by birds in fields were made by analysis of stomach contents and observation of feeding behaviour. Modern studies aimed to manage birds in agriculture make use of a wide range of principles from ecology. Intensive aquaculture has brought humans in conflict with fish-eating birds such as cormorants.


title: Ornithology

text: Large flocks of pigeons and starlings in cities are often considered as a nuisance, and techniques to reduce their populations or their impacts are constantly innovated. Birds are also of medical importance, and their role as carriers of human diseases such as Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus, and influenza H5N1 have been widely recognized. Bird strikes and the damage they cause in aviation are of particularly great importance, due to the fatal consequences and the level of economic losses caused. The airline industry incurs worldwide damages of an estimated US$1.2 billion each year.


title: Ornithology

text: Many species of birds have been driven to extinction by human activities. Being conspicuous elements of the ecosystem, they have been considered as indicators of ecological health. They have also helped in gathering support for habitat conservation. Bird conservation requires specialized knowledge in aspects of biology and ecology, and may require the use of very location-specific approaches. Ornithologists contribute to conservation biology by studying the ecology of birds in the wild and identifying the key threats and ways of enhancing the survival of species. Critically endangered species such as the California condor have had to be captured and bred in captivity. Such "ex situ" conservation measures may be followed by reintroduction of the species into the wild.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kanhaiya Kumar is an Indian political activist who served as the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union and leader of the All India Students Federation (AISF). He served as National Executive Council member of Communist Party of India. He joined Indian National Congress on 28 September 2021.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kanhaiya Kumar was born in January 1987, and brought up in the village of Bihat (near Barauni) in Begusarai district, Bihar. The village is part of the Teghra constituency, known to be a stronghold of the CPI. Kumar's father is Jaishankar Singh. His mother, Meena Devi is an "Anganwadi" worker. He has an elder brother, Manikant, who works as a supervisor with a company in Assam. His family members have traditionally been supporters of the CPI.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kanhaiya Kumar studied till Class VI at Madhya Vidyalaya, Masnadpur, before joining R. K. C. High School in Barauni. During his school days, Kumar took part in several plays and activities organized by IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association), a left-leaning cultural group going back to the days of India's freedom struggle. He cleared his Class X board exams in 2002 with a first division. After school, Kumar joined the Ram Ratan Singh College at Mokama, taking up science in Class XI-XII. He then graduated with a degree in geography from the College of Commerce, Arts and Science, Patna in 2007, earning a "first-class".


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: While at the Patna College of Commerce, Kumar began getting involved in student politics. He joined the AISF, and a year later was selected as a delegate at its conference in Patna. After completing his post graduation with an MA in sociology from Nalanda Open University in Patna, again securing a first class, he moved to Delhi and after ranking first in the entrance exam in 2011, joined Jawaharlal Nehru University where he pursued a PhD in African studies at the School of International Studies. He completed his PhD in February 2019, titled "The Process of Decolonisation and Social Transformation in South Africa, 1994–2015.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: In March 2016, Kumar stated in an interview, "the first inspiration who made me want to join politics was Bhagat Singh. Then the path continued into Ambedkar, Gandhi and Marx, and also to Birsa Munda and Jyotirao Phule..."


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kumar's autobiography, "Bihar to Tihar: My Political Journey" was published in October 2016. The book describes his life from his childhood days to his political involvement in Delhi.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 29 April 2018, he was elected to the party national council of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Later in 2019, he was inducted into CPI national executive council.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kumar contested from Begusarai on Communist Party of India's ticket for the 2019 Indian general election. He lost the election, polling a total of votes and 22.03% of vote share. He secured a distant second position after losing to Giriraj Singh of Bharatiya Janata Party by votes. About his defeat, he told "Aaj Tak" in an interview, "I didn't have anything directly to lose in these elections. I got support from the people for fighting against a big, rich and influential machinery and this is a message from democracy that a son of an Anganwadi worker can contest elections."


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: In February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested by the Delhi Police over the charges of sedition in an event at the JNU campus. It was organised by JNU students to commemorate the second anniversary of the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. Kumar denied shouting any slogans against integrity of the country. Kumar's arrest drew sharp reactions from opposition parties, teachers, students and academics. Students at JNU went on strike to protest his arrest.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Kumar was assaulted on multiple occasions when brought to the Patiala House court for hearings regarding the matter. A Supreme Court-appointed panel later confirmed that the policemen present at the Court were responsible for the security lapses.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 2 March 2016, Kumar was granted interim bail for 6 months by the Delhi High Court, conditional on an undertaking that he would not "participate in any anti-national activity." Justice Pratibha Rani noted that there were no recordings of Kumar participating in anti-national slogans. A separate magisterial investigation appointed by the Delhi Government concluded that it did not find any evidence of Kumar participating in anti-national slogans.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: Following his release from jail, Kumar faced death threats. A leader of the BJP's youth wing offered 5 lakh as a reward to anyone who cut off Kumar's tongue. Posters were put up in New Delhi offering 11 lakh as a reward to anyone who killed Kumar.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 3 March 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar gave a speech to a packed auditorium in the JNU campus, during which he said he was seeking, not freedom from India, but freedom "within" India. He appealed to his fellow students to free the nation from the clutches of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which, he stated, was trying to divide the nation. Referring to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, he called them his "opposition", not his enemy. He urged his supporters to keep raising the slogans of "Azadi" (freedom). The speech won accolades from the leaders of non-BJP parties as well as independent commentators. Shashi Tharoor commented that it turned Kumar into a "nationwide political star," and congratulated BJP for creating this phenomenon. Some people also expressed concern that his speech did not address "the graveness of alleged anti-national slogans" shouted at JNU and what he did to stop them.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 8 March 2016, speaking at an International Women's Day event, Kumar referred to the rape of Kashmiri women committed by personnel of the Indian Army. This was criticised as being "anti-national" by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM). The BJYM filed a complaint against Kumar and JNU professor Nivedita Menon, alleging them of making "anti-national" statements. A sedition and defamation case was filed against Kumar in a civil court in Patna.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 10 March 2016, it was revealed that in October 2015, Kumar was fined by the JNU administration for "misbehaving" with a girl student and "threatening" her. Kumar had allegedly been urinating in the open in June 2015 and became abusive and threatened the female student who objected against his behavior. The AISF stated that the case was an attempt to defame Kumar.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 10 March 2016, Kumar was manhandled and abused on the JNU campus by a man who accused him of being a "deshdrohi" (). This incident came two days after Kumar made a speech on International Women's Day, during which he accused Security personnel for raping woman in Kashmir. However,while addressing students later in the day, Kumar said such incidents couldn't scare him.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 28 March 2016, Uttar Pradesh Navnirman Sena threatened to storm the JNU campus and gun down Kumar and Umar Khalid unless the two left Delhi by 31 March.


title: Kanhaiya Kumar

text: On 29 March 2019, Kumar who was contesting the Lok Sabha polls as a CPI candidate was booked for violation for model code of conduct of elections.


title: Historical negationism

text: Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with "historical revisionism", a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.


title: Historical negationism

text: Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; others mandate negationist views, such as California, where schoolchildren have been explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide. Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the myth of the clean "Wehrmacht", Japanese history textbook controversies, Holodomor denial and historiography in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Some notable historical negationists include Grover Furr, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Ernst Zundel, Shudo Higashinakano, Shinzo Abe, Bongbong Marcos, and Keith Windschuttle. In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as "Nineteen Eighty-Four", by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.


title: Historical negationism

text: The term "negationism" ("négationnisme") was first coined by the French historian Henry Rousso in his 1987 book "The Vichy Syndrome" which looked at the French popular memory of Vichy France and the French Resistance. Rousso posited that it was necessary to distinguish between legitimate historical revisionism in Holocaust studies and politically motivated denial of the Holocaust, which he termed negationism.


title: Historical negationism

text: Usually, the purpose of historical negation is to achieve a national, political aim, by transferring war guilt, demonizing an enemy, providing an illusion of victory, or preserving a friendship. Sometimes the purpose of a revised history is to sell more books or to attract attention with a newspaper headline. The historian James M. McPherson said that negationists would want revisionist history understood as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present".


title: Historical negationism

text: The principal functions of negationist history are the abilities to control ideological influence and to control political influence.


title: Historical negationism

text: In "History Men Battle over Britain's Future", Michael d'Ancona said that historical negationists "seem to have been given a collective task in [a] nation's cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: To redefine [national] status in a changing world". History is a social resource that contributes to shaping national identity, culture, and the public memory. Through the study of history, people are imbued with a particular cultural identity; therefore, by negatively revising history, the negationist can craft a specific, ideological identity. Because historians are credited as people who single-mindedly pursue truth, by way of fact, negationist historians capitalize on the historian's professional credibility, and present their pseudohistory as true scholarship. By adding a measure of credibility to the work of revised history, the ideas of the negationist historian are more readily accepted in the public mind. As such, professional historians recognize the revisionist practice of historical negationism as the work of "truth-seekers" finding different truths in the historical record to fit their political, social, and ideological contexts.


title: Historical negationism

text: History provides insight into past political policies and consequences, and thus assists people in extrapolating political implications for contemporary society. Historical negationism is applied to cultivate a specific political myth, sometimes with official consent from the government, whereby self-taught, amateur, and dissident academic historians either manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. Since the late 1930s in the Soviet Union, the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and historiography in the Soviet Union treated reality and the party line as the same intellectual entity, especially in regards to the Russian Civil War and peasants rebellions; Soviet historical negationism advanced a specific, political, and ideological agenda about Russia and its place in world history.


title: Historical negationism

text: Historical negationism applies the techniques of research, quotation, and presentation for deception of the reader and denial of the historical record. In support of the "revised history" perspective, the negationist historian uses false documents as genuine sources, presents specious reasons to distrust genuine documents, exploits published opinions by quoting out of historical context, manipulates statistics, and mistranslates texts in other languages. The revision techniques of historical negationism operate in the intellectual space of public debate for the advancement of a given interpretation of history and the cultural perspective of the "revised history". As a document, the revised history is used to negate the validity of the factual, documentary record, and so reframe explanations and perceptions of the discussed historical event, to deceive the reader, the listener, and the viewer; therefore, historical negationism functions as a technique of propaganda. Rather than submit their works for peer review, negationist historians rewrite history and use logical fallacies to construct arguments that will obtain the desired results, a "revised history" that supports an agenda – political, ideological, religious, etc.


title: Historical negationism

text: In the practice of historiography, the British historian Richard J. Evans describes the technical differences, between professional historians and negationist historians, commenting: "Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account, and, if necessary, amend their own case, accordingly. They do not present, as genuine, documents which they know to be forged, just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious, but implausible, and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents, because these documents run counter to their arguments; again, they amend their arguments, if this is the case, or, indeed, abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources, which, in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability, or otherwise, simply because they want, for whatever reason, to maximize the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures, as impartially as possible, to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not willfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events, for which there is no historical evidence, to make their arguments more plausible."


title: Historical negationism

text: Deception includes falsifying information, obscuring the truth, and lying to manipulate public opinion about the historical event discussed in the revised history. The negationist historian applies the techniques of deception to achieve either a political or an ideological goal, or both. The field of history distinguishes among history books based upon credible, verifiable sources, which were peer-reviewed before publication; and deceptive history books, based upon unreliable sources, which were not submitted for peer review. The distinction among types of history books rests upon the research techniques used in writing a history. Verifiability, accuracy, and openness to criticism are central tenets of historical scholarship. When these techniques are sidestepped, the presented historical information might be deliberately deceptive, a "revised history".


title: Historical negationism

text: Denial is defensively protecting information from being shared with other historians, and claiming that facts are untrue, especially denial of the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in the course of the World War II (1939–45) and the Holocaust (1933–45). The negationist historian protects the historical-revisionism project by blame shifting, censorship, distraction, and media manipulation; occasionally, denial by protection includes risk management for the physical security of revisionist sources.


title: Historical negationism

text: Comparing certain historical atrocities to other crimes is the practice of relativization, interpretation by moral judgements, to alter public perception of the first historical atrocity. Although such comparisons often occur in negationist history, their pronouncement is not usually part of revisionist intentions upon the historical facts, but an opinion of moral judgement.


title: Historical negationism

text: Repositories of literature have been targeted throughout history (e.g., the Library of Alexandria, Grand Library of Baghdad), burning of the liturgical and historical books of the St. Thomas Christians by the archbishop of Goa Aleixo de Menezes, including recently, such as the 1981 Burning of Jaffna library and the destruction of Iraqi libraries by ISIS during the fall of Mosul in 2014. Similarly, British officials would destroy documents in Operation Legacy to avoid records on colonial rule to fall into hands of countries declaring independence from Britain and scrutiny of the British state.


title: Historical negationism

text: The "Burning of books and burying of scholars" (), or "Fires of Qin", refers to the burning of writings and slaughter of scholars during the Qin Dynasty of Ancient China, between the period of 213 and 210 BC. "Books" at this point refers to writings on bamboo strips, which were then bound together. This contributed to the loss to history of many philosophical theories of proper government (known as "the Hundred Schools of Thought"). The official philosophy of government ("legalism") survived.


title: Historical negationism

text: The historical negationism of American Civil War revisionists and Neo-Confederates claims that the Confederate States (1861–65) were the defenders rather than the instigators of the American Civil War, and that the Confederacy's motivation for secession from the United States was the maintenance of the Southern states' rights and limited government, rather than the preservation and expansion of chattel slavery.


title: Historical negationism

text: Regarding Neo-Confederate revisionism of the U.S. Civil War, the historian Brooks D. Simpson says: "This is an active attempt to reshape historical memory, an effort by white Southerners to find historical justifications for present-day actions. The neo–Confederate movement's ideologues have grasped that if they control how people remember the past, they'll control how people approach the present and the future. Ultimately, this is a very conscious war for memory and heritage. It's a quest for legitimacy, the eternal quest for justification."


title: Historical negationism

text: In the early 20th century, Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), led the attack against American history textbooks that did not present the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" version of the history of the U.S. Civil War. To that pedagogical end, Rutherford assembled a "massive collection" of documents that included "essay contests on the glory of the Ku Klux Klan and personal tributes to faithful slaves". About the historical negationism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the historian David Blight says: "All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the white supremacist vision of Civil War memory."


title: Historical negationism

text: Between 1846 and 1873, following the conquest of California by the United States, the region's Indigenous Californian population plummeted from around 150,000 to around 30,000 due to disease, famine, forced removals, slavery, and massacres. Many historians refer to the massacres as the California genocide. Between 9,500 and 16,000 California Natives were killed by both government forces and white settlers in massacres during this period. Despite the well documented evidence of the widespread massacres and atrocities, the public school curriculum and history textbooks approved by the California Department of Education ignore the history of this genocide.


title: Historical negationism

text: According to author Clifford Trafzer, although many historians have pushed for recognition of the genocide in public school curricula, government-approved textbooks omit mention of the genocide because of the dominance of conservative publishing companies with an ideological impetus to deny the genocide, the fear of publishing companies being branded as un-American for discussing it, and the unwillingness of state and federal government officials to acknowledge the genocide due to the possibility of having to pay reparations to indigenous communities affected by it.


title: Historical negationism

text: The post-war minimization of the war crimes of Japanese imperialism is an example of "illegitimate" historical revisionism; some contemporary Japanese revisionists, such as Yūko Iwanami (granddaughter of General Hideki Tojo), propose that Japan's invasion of China, and World War II, itself, were justified reactions to the racist Western imperialism of the time. On 2 March 2007, Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe denied that the military had forced women into sexual slavery during the war, saying, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion". Before he spoke, some Liberal Democratic Party legislators also sought to revise Yōhei Kōno's apology to former comfort women in 1993; likewise, there was the controversial negation of the six-week Nanking Massacre in 1937–1938.


title: Historical negationism

text: Shinzō Abe was general secretary of a group of parliament members concerned with history education (Japanese: 日本の前途と歴史教育を考える若手議員の会) that is associated with the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, and was a special advisor to Nippon Kaigi, which are two openly revisionist groups denying, downplaying, or justifying various Japanese war crimes. Editor-in-chief of the conservative "Yomiuri Shimbun" Tsuneo Watanabe criticized the Yasukuni Shrine as a bastion of revisionism: "The Yasukuni Shrine runs a museum where they show items in order to encourage and worship militarism. It's wrong for the prime minister to visit such a place". Other critics note that men, who would contemporarily be perceived as "Korean" and "Chinese", are enshrined for the military actions they effected as Japanese Imperial subjects.


title: Historical negationism

text: The "Hibakusha" ("explosion-affected people") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seek compensation from their government and criticize it for failing to "accept responsibility for having instigated and then prolonged an aggressive war long after Japan's defeat was apparent, resulting in a heavy toll in Japanese, Asian and American lives". Historians Hill and Koshiro have stated that attempts to minimize the importance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is revisionist history. EB Sledge expressed concern that such revisionism, in his words "mellowing", would allow the harsh facts of the history that led to the bombings to be forgotten.


title: Historical negationism

text: Some Croats, including some high-ranked officials and political leaders during the 1990s and far-right organization members, have attempted to minimize the magnitude of the genocide perpetrated against Serbs and other ethnic minorities in the World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany, the Independent State of Croatia. By 1989, the future President of Croatia Franjo Tuđman (who had been a Partisan during World War II), had embraced Croatian nationalism and published "", in which he questioned the official number of victims killed by the Ustaše during the Second World War, particularly at the Jasenovac concentration camp. Yugoslav and Serbian historiography had long exaggerated the number of victims at the camp. Tuđman criticized the long-standing figures, but also described the camp as a "work camp", giving an estimate of between 30,000 and 40,000 deaths. Tuđman's government's toleration of Ustaša symbols and their crimes often dismissed in public, frequently strained relations with Israel.


title: Historical negationism

text: Croatia's far-right often advocates the false theory that Jasenovac was a "labour camp" where mass murder did not take place. In 2017, two videos of former Croatian president Stjepan Mesić from 1992 were made public in which he stated that Jasenovac wasn't a death camp. The far-right NGO "The Society for Research of the Threefold Jasenovac Camp" also advocates this disproven theory, in addition to claiming that the camp was used by the Yugoslav authorities following the war to imprison Ustasha members and regular Home Guard army troops until 1948, then alleged Stalinists until 1951. Its members include journalist Igor Vukić, who wrote his own book advocating the theory, Catholic priest Stjepan Razum and academic Josip Pečarić. The ideas promoted by its members have been amplified by mainstream media interviews and book tours. The last book, "The Jasenovac Lie Revealed" written by Vukić, prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Center to urge Croatian authorities to ban such works, noting that they "would immediately be banned in Germany and Austria and rightfully so". In 2016, Croatian filmmaker Jakov Sedlar released a documentary "Jasenovac – The Truth" which advocated the same theories, labeling the camp as a "collection and labour camp". The film contained alleged falsifications and forgeries, in addition to denial of crimes and hate speech towards politicians and journalists.


title: Historical negationism

text: Among far-right and nationalist groups, denial and revisionism of Serbian war crimes are carried out through the downplaying of Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić's roles in the extermination of Serbia's Jews in concentration camps, in the German-occupied Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia by a number of Serbian historians. Serbian collaborationist armed forces were involved, either directly or indirectly, in the mass killings of Jews as well as Roma and those Serbs who sided with any anti-German resistance and the killing of many Croats and Muslims. Since the end of the war, Serbian collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of historical revisionism by Serbian leaders. In 1993, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts listed Nedić among "The 100 most prominent Serbs". There is also the denial of Chetnik collaboration with Axis forces and crimes committed during World War II. Serbian historian Jelena Djureinovic poists in her book "The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution" that "during those years, the WWII nationalist Chetniks have been recast as an anti-fascist movement equivalent to Tito's Partisans, and as victims of communism". The glorification of the Chetnik movement has now become the central theme of Serbia's WWII memory politics. Chetnik leaders convicted under communist rule of collaboration with the Nazis have been rehabilitated by Serbian courts, and television programmes have contributed to spreading a positive image of the movement, "distorting the real picture of what happened during WWII".


title: Historical negationism

text: There have been a number of far-right and nationalist authors and political activists who have publicly disagreed with mainstream views of Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of 1991–1999. Some high-ranked Serbian officials and political leaders who categorically claimed that no genocide against Bosnian Muslims took place at all, include former president of Serbia Tomislav Nikolić, Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, Serbian Minister of Defence Aleksandar Vulin and Serbian far-right leader Vojislav Šešelj. Among the points of contention are whether the victims of massacres such as the Račak massacre and Srebrenica massacre were unarmed civilians or armed resistance fighters, whether death and rape tolls were inflated, and whether prison camps such as Sremska Mitrovica camp were sites of mass war crimes. These authors are called "revisionists" by scholars and organizations, such as ICTY.


title: Historical negationism

text: The "Report about Case Srebrenica" by Darko Trifunovic, commissioned by the government of the Republika Srpska, was described by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as "one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995". Outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures eventually forced the Republika Srpska to disown the report. In 2017 legislation that banned the teaching of the Srebrenica genocide and Sarajevo siege in schools was introduced in Republika Srpska, initiated by President Milorad Dodik and his SNSD party, who stated that it was "impossible to use here the textbooks … which say the Serbs have committed genocide and kept Sarajevo under siege. This is not correct and this will not be taught here". In 2019 Republika Srpska authorities appointed Israeli historian Gideon Greif – who has worked at Yad Vashem for more than three decades - to head its own revisionist commission to "determine the truth" about Srebrenica.


title: Historical negationism

text: Turkish laws such as Article 301, that state "a person who publicly insults Turkishness, or the Republic or [the] Turkish Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be punishable by imprisonment", were used to criminally charge the writer Orhan Pamuk with disrespecting Turkey, for saying that "Thirty thousand Kurds, and a million Armenians, were killed in these lands, and nobody, but me, dares to talk about it". The controversy occurred as Turkey was first vying for membership in the European Union (EU) where the suppression of dissenters is looked down upon. Article 301 originally was part of penal-law reforms meant to modernize Turkey to European Union standards, as part of negotiating Turkey's accession to the EU. In 2006, the charges were dropped due to pressure from the European Union and United States on the Turkish government.


title: Historical negationism

text: On 7 February 2006, five journalists were tried for insulting the judicial institutions of the State, and for aiming to prejudice a court case (per Article 288 of the Turkish penal code). The reporters were on trial for criticizing the court-ordered closing of a conference in Istanbul regarding the Armenian genocide during the time of the Ottoman Empire. The conference continued elsewhere, transferring locations from a state to a private university. The trial continued until 11 April 2006, when four of the reporters were acquitted. The case against the fifth journalist, Murat Belge, proceeded until 8 June 2006, when he was also acquitted. The purpose of the conference was to critically analyse the official Turkish view of the Armenian genocide in 1915; a taboo subject in Turkey. The trial proved to be a test case between Turkey and the European Union; the EU insisted that Turkey should allow increased freedom of expression rights, as a condition to membership.


title: Historical negationism

text: The Islamic Republic of Iran uses historical negationism against religious minorities in order to maintain legitimacy and relevancy of the regime. One example is the regime's approach to Bahai community. In 2008, the erroneous and misleading biography of Bab was presented to all primary school children.


title: Historical negationism

text: In his official 2013 Nowruz address, Supreme Leader of Iran Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, remarking that "The Holocaust is an event whose reality is uncertain and if it has happened, it's uncertain how it has happened." This was consistent with Khamenei's previous comments regarding the Holocaust.


title: Historical negationism

text: During the existence of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) attempted to ideologically and politically control the writing of both academic and popular history. These attempts were most successful in the 1934–1952 period. According to Klaus Mehnert, the Soviets attempt to control academic historiography (the writing of history by academic historians) to promote ideological and ethno-racial imperialism by Russians. During the 1928–1956 period, modern and contemporary history was generally composed according to the wishes of the CPSU, not the requirements of accepted historiographic method.


title: Historical negationism

text: During and after the rule of Nikita Khrushchev (1956–1964), Soviet historiographic practice was more complicated. Although not entirely corrupted, Soviet historiography was characterized by complex competition between Stalinist and anti-Stalinist Marxist historians. To avoid the professional hazard of politicized history, some historians chose pre-modern, medieval history or classical history, where ideological demands were relatively relaxed and conversation with other historians in the field could be fostered; despite the potential danger of proscribed ideology corrupting historians' work, not all of Soviet historiography was corrupt. Control over party history and the legal status of individual ex-party members played a large role in dictating the ideological diversity and thus the faction in power within the CPSU. The official "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)" was revised to delete references to leaders purged from the party, especially during the rule of Joseph Stalin (1922–1953).


title: Historical negationism

text: In the historiography of the Cold War, a controversy over negationist historical revisionism exists, where numerous revisionist scholars in the West have been accused of whitewashing the crimes of Stalinism, overlooking the Katyn massacre in Poland, disregarding the validity of the Venona Project messages with regards to Soviet espionage in the United States, as well as the denial of the Holodomor of 1932–1933.


title: Historical negationism

text: Many scholars, among them Victor Schnirelmann, Willem Floor, Robert Hewsen, George Bournoutian and others state that in Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan since the 1960s there is a practice of revising primary sources on the South Caucasus in which any mention about Armenians is removed. In the revised texts, "Armenian" is either simply removed or is replaced by "Albanian"; there are many other examples of such falsifications, all of which have the purpose of creating an impression that historically Armenians were not present in this territory. Willem M. Floor and Hasan Javadi in the English edition of "The Heavenly Rose-Garden: A History of Shirvan & Daghestan" by Abbasgulu Bakikhanov specifically point out to the instances of distortions and falsifications made by Ziya Bunyadov in his Russian translation of this book. According to Bournoutian and Hewsen these distortions are widespread in these works; they thus advise the readers in general to avoid the books produced in Azerbaijan in Soviet and post-Soviet times if these books do not contain the facsimile copy of original sources. Shnirelman thinks that this practice is being realized in Azerbaijan according to state order. Philip L. Kohl brings an example of a theory advanced by Azerbaijani archeologist Akhundov about Albanian origin of Khachkars as an example of patently false cultural origin myths.


title: Historical negationism

text: The Armenian cemetery in Julfa, a cemetery near the town of Julfa, in the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan originally housed around 10,000 funerary monuments. The tombstones consisted mainly of thousands of "khachkars", uniquely decorated cross-stones characteristic of medieval Christian Armenian art. The cemetery was still standing in the late 1990s, when the government of Azerbaijan began a systematic campaign to destroy the monuments. After studying and comparing satellite photos of Julfa taken in 2003 and 2009, the American Association for the Advancement of Science came to the conclusion in December 2010 that the cemetery was demolished and leveled. After the director of the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky expressed his protest about the destruction of Armenian khachkars in Julfa, he was accused by Azerbaijanis of supporting the "total falsification of the history and culture of Azerbaijan". Several appeals were filed by both Armenian and international organizations, condemning the Azerbaijani government and calling on it to desist from such activity. In 2006, Azerbaijan barred European Parliament members from investigating the claims, charging them with a "biased and hysterical approach" to the issue and stating that it would only accept a delegation if it visited Armenian-occupied territory as well. In the spring of 2006, a journalist from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting who visited the area reported that no visible traces of the cemetery remained. In the same year, photographs taken from Iran showed that the cemetery site had been turned into a military shooting range. The destruction of the cemetery has been widely described by Armenian sources, and some non-Armenian sources, as an act of "cultural genocide."


title: Historical negationism

text: In Azerbaijan, the Armenian genocide is officially denied and is considered a hoax. According to the state ideology of Azerbaijan, a genocide of Azerbaijanis, carried out by Armenians and Russians, took place starting from 1813. Mahmudov has claimed that Armenians first appeared in Karabakh in 1828. Azerbaijani academics and politicians have claimed that foreign historians falsify the history of Azerbaijan and criticism was directed towards a Russian documentary about the regions of Karabakh and Nakhchivan and the historical Armenian presence in these areas. According to the institute director of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences Yagub Mahmudov, prior to 1918 "there was never an Armenian state in the South Caucasus". According to Mahmudov, Ilham Aliyev's statement in which he said that "Irevan is our [Azerbaijan's] historic land, and we, Azerbaijanis must return to these historic lands", was based "historical facts" and "historical reality". Mahmudov also stated that the claim that Armenian's are the most ancient people in the region is based on propaganda, and said that Armenians are non-natives of the region, having only arrived in the area after Russian victories over Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the first half of the 19th century. The institute director also said: "The Azerbaijani soldier should know that the land under the feet of provocative Armenians is Azerbaijani land. The enemy can never defeat Azerbaijanis on Azerbaijani soil. Those who rule the Armenian state today must fundamentally change their political course. The Armenians cannot defeat us by sitting in our historic city of Irevan."


title: Historical negationism

text: Historic falsifications in Azerbaijan, in relation to Iran and its history, are "backed by state and state backed non-governmental organizational bodies", ranging "from elementary school all the way to the highest level of universities". As a result of the two Russo-Iranian Wars of the 19th century, the border between what is present-day Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan was formed. Although there had not been a historical Azerbaijani state to speak of in history, the demarcation, set at the Aras river, left significant numbers of what were later coined "Azerbaijanis" to the north of the Aras river. During the existence of the Azerbaijan SSR, as a result of Soviet-era historical revionism and myth-building, the notion of a "northern" and "southern" Azerbaijan was formulated and spread throughout the Soviet Union. During the Soviet nation building campaign, any event, both past and present, that had ever occurred in what is the present-day Azerbaijan Republic and Iranian Azerbaijan were rebranded as phenomenons of "Azerbaijani culture". Any Iranian ruler or poet that had lived in the area was assigned to the newly rebranded identity of the Transcaucasian Turkophones, in other words "Azerbaijanis".


title: Historical negationism

text: According to Michael P. Croissant: "It was charged that the "two Azerbaijans", once united, were separated artificially by a conspiracy between imperial Russia and Iran". This notion based on illegitimate historic revisionism suited Soviet political purposes well (based on "anti-imperialism"), and became the basis for irredentism among Azerbaijani nationalists in the last years of the Soviet Union, shortly prior to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Republic in 1991.


title: Historical negationism

text: In Azerbaijan, periods and aspects of Iranian history are usually claimed as being an "Azerbaijani" product in a distortion of history, and historic Iranian figures, such as the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi are called "Azerbaijanis", contrary to universally acknowledged fact. In the Azerbaijan SSR, forgeries such as an alleged "Turkish "divan"" and falsified verses were published in order to "Turkify" Nizami Ganjavi. Although this type of irredentism was initially the result of the nation building policy of the Soviets, it became an instrument for "biased, pseudo-academic approaches and political speculations" in the nationalistic aspirations of the young Azerbaijan Republic. In the modern Azerbaijan Republic, historiography is written with the aim of retroactively Turkifying many of the peoples and kingdoms that existed prior to the arrival of Turks in the region, including the Iranian Medes. According to professor of history George Bournoutian:


title: Historical negationism

text: Since the start of the Korean War (1950–1953), the government of North Korea has consistently denied that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched the attack with which it began the war for the Communist unification of Korea. The historiography of the DPRK maintains that the war was provoked by South Korea, at the instigation of the United States: "On June 17, Juche 39 [1950] the then U.S. President [Harry S.] Truman sent [John Foster] Dulles as his special envoy to South Korea to examine the anti-North war scenario and give an order to start the attack. On June 18, Dulles inspected the 38th parallel and the war preparations of the 'ROK Army' units. That day he told Syngman Rhee to start the attack on North Korea with the counter-propaganda that North Korea first 'invaded' the south."


title: Historical negationism

text: Further North Korean pronouncements included the claim that the U.S. needed the peninsula of Korea as "a bridgehead, for invading the Asian continent, and as a strategic base, from which to fight against national-liberation movements and socialism, and, ultimately, to attain world supremacy." Likewise, the DPRK denied the war crimes committed by the Korean People's Army in the course of the war; nonetheless, in the 1951–1952 period, the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) privately admitted to the "excesses" of their earlier campaign against North Korean citizens who had collaborated with the enemy – either actually or allegedly – during the US–South Korean occupation of North Korea. Later, the WPK blamed every wartime atrocity upon the U.S. Armed Forces, e.g. the Sinchon Massacre (17 October – 7 December 1950) occurred during the retreat of the DPRK government from Hwanghae Province, in the south-west of North Korea.


title: Historical negationism

text: The campaign against "collaborators" was attributed to political and ideological manipulations by the U.S.; the high-rank leader Pak Chang-ok said that the American enemy had "started to use a new method, namely, it donned a leftist garb, which considerably influenced the inexperienced cadres of the Party and government organs." Kathryn Weathersby's "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives" (1993) confirmed that the Korean War was launched by order of Kim Il-sung (1912–1994); and also refuted the DPRK's allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War. The Korean Central News Agency dismissed the historical record of Soviet documents as "sheer forgery".


title: Historical negationism

text: Holocaust deniers usually reject the term "Holocaust denier" as an inaccurate description of their historical point of view, instead preferring the term "Holocaust revisionist"; nonetheless, scholars prefer "Holocaust denier" to differentiate deniers from legitimate historical revisionists, whose goal is to accurately analyse historical evidence with established methods. Historian Alan Berger reports that Holocaust deniers argue in support of a preconceived theory – that the Holocaust either did not occur or was mostly a hoax – by ignoring extensive historical evidence to the contrary.


title: Historical negationism

text: When the author David Irving lost his English libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin Books, and thus was publicly discredited and identified as a Holocaust denier, the trial judge, Justice Charles Gray, concluded that "Irving has, for his own ideological reasons, persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that, for the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility for, the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."


title: Historical negationism

text: On 20 February 2006, Irving was found guilty, and sentenced to three years imprisonment for Holocaust denial, under Austria's 1947 law banning Nazi revivalism and criminalizing the "public denial, belittling or justification of National Socialist crimes". Besides Austria, eleven other countries – including Belgium, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Switzerland – have criminalized Holocaust denial as punishable with imprisonment.


title: Historical negationism

text: The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were a series of pro-democracy demonstrations against the Chinese Communist Party that were put down violently on 4 June 1989, by the Chinese government via the People's Liberation Army, resulting in estimated casualties of over 10,000 deaths and 40,000 injured, obtained via later declassified documents.


title: Historical negationism

text: According to Eugene N. Borza, the Macedonians are in search of their past to legitimize their unsure present, in the disorder of the Balkan politics. Ivaylo Dichev claims that the Macedonian historiography has the impossible task of filling the huge gaps between the ancient kingdom of Macedon, that collapsed in 2nd century BC, the 10th–11th century state of the Cometopuls, and the Yugoslav Macedonia established in the middle of the 20th century.


title: Historical negationism

text: According to Ulf Brunnbauer, modern Macedonian historiography is highly politicized, because the Macedonian nation-building process is still in development. The recent nation-building project imposes the idea of a "Macedonian nation" with unbroken continuity from the antiquity (Ancient Macedonians) to the modern times, which has been criticized by some domestic and foreign scholars for ahistorically projecting modern ethnic distinctions into the past. In this way generations of students were educated in pseudohistory.


title: Historical negationism

text: The history textbook controversy centres upon the secondary school history textbook "Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho" ("New History Textbook") said to minimize the nature of Japanese militarism in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), in annexing Korea in 1910, in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and in the Pacific Theater of World War II (1941–45). The conservative Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform commissioned the "Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho" textbook with the purpose of traditional national and international view of that Japanese historical period. The Ministry of Education vets all history textbooks, especially those containing references to imperialist atrocities due to a special provision in the textbook examination rules to avoid inflaming controversy with neighboring countries; however, the "Atarashii Rekishi Kyōkasho" de-emphasizes aggressive Japanese Imperial wartime behaviour and the matter of Chinese and Korean comfort women. When it comes to the Nanking massacre, the textbook only refers to it as the Nanking Incident, mentioning there were civilian casualties without delving into specifics, and mentioning it again in relation to the Tokyo tribunal, stating that there are multiple opinions about the topic with controversies continuing to this day (see Nanking massacre denial). In 2007, the Ministry of Education attempted to revise textbooks regarding the Battle of Okinawa, lessening the involvement of the Imperial Japanese Army in Okinawan civilian mass suicides.


title: Historical negationism

text: Allegations of historical revisionism have been made regarding Pakistani textbooks in that they are laced with Indophobic, Hindu-hating and Islamist bias. Pakistan's use of officially published textbooks has been criticized for using schools to more subtly foster religious extremism, whitewashing Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent and promoting "expansive pan-Islamic imaginings" that "detect the beginnings of Pakistan in the birth of Islam on the Arabian peninsula". Since 2001, the Pakistani government has stated that curriculum reforms have been underway by the Ministry of Education.


title: Historical negationism

text: 12 October 2015, South Korea's government has announced controversial plans to control the history textbooks used in secondary schools despite oppositional concerns of people and academics that the decision is made to glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa). Section and the authoritarian dictatorships in South Korea during 1960s–1980s.The Ministry of Education announced that it would put the secondary-school history textbook under state control; "This was an inevitable choice in order to straighten out historical errors and end the social dispute caused by ideological bias in the textbooks," Hwang Woo-yea, education minister said on 12 October 2015. According to the government's plan, the current history textbooks of South Korea will be replaced by a single textbook written by a panel of government-appointed historians and the new series of publications would be issued under the title "The Correct Textbook of History" and are to be issued to the public and private primary and secondary schools in 2017 onwards.


title: Historical negationism

text: The move has sparked fierce criticism from academics who argue that the system can be used to distort the history and glorify the history of those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa) and of the authoritarian dictatorships. Moreover, 466 organizations including Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union formed History Act Network in solidarity and have staged protests: "The government's decision allows the state too much control and power and, therefore, it is against political neutrality that is certainly the fundamental principle of education." Many South Korean historians condemned Kyohaksa for their text glorifying those who served the Imperial Japanese government (Chinilpa) and the authoritarian dictatorship with a far-right political perspective. On the other hand, New Right supporters welcomed the textbook, saying that "the new textbook finally describes historical truths contrary to the history textbooks published by left-wing publishers", and the textbook issue became intensified as a case of ideological conflict. In Korean history, the history textbook was once put under state control during the authoritarian regime under Park Chung-hee (1963–1979), who is a father of Park Geun-hye, former President of South Korea, and was used as a means to keep the Yushin Regime, also known as the Yushin Dictatorship; however, there had been continuous criticisms about the system especially from the 1980s when Korea experienced a dramatic democratic development. In 2003, reformation of textbook began when the textbooks on Korean modern and contemporary history were published though the Textbook Screening System, which allows textbooks to be published not by a single government body but by many different companies, for the first time.


title: Historical negationism

text: Education in Turkey is centralized, and its policy, administration, and content are each determined by the Turkish government. Textbooks taught in schools are either prepared directly by the Ministry of National Education (MEB) or must be approved by its Instruction and Education Board. In practice, this means that the Turkish government is directly responsible for what textbooks are taught in schools across Turkey. In 2014, Taner Akçam, writing for the "Armenian Weekly", discussed 2014–2015 Turkish elementary and middle school textbooks that the MEB had made available on the internet. He found that Turkish history textbooks describe Armenians as people "who are incited by foreigners, who aim to break apart the state and the country, and who murdered Turks and Muslims." The Armenian genocide is referred to as the "Armenian matter", and is described as a lie perpetrated to further the perceived hidden agenda of Armenians. Recognition of the Armenian genocide is defined as the "biggest threat to Turkish national security".


title: Historical negationism

text: Akçam summarized one textbook that claims the Armenians had sided with the Russians during the war. The 1909 Adana massacre, in which as many as 20,000–30,000 Armenians were massacred, is identified as "The Rebellion of Armenians of Adana". According to the book, the Armenian Hnchak and Dashnak organizations instituted rebellions in many parts of Anatolia, and "didn't hesitate to kill Armenians who would not join them," issuing instructions that "if you want to survive you have to kill your neighbor first." Claims highlighted by Akçam: "[The Armenians murdered] many people living in villages, even children, by attacking Turkish villages, which had become defenseless because all the Turkish men were fighting on the war fronts. ... They stabbed the Ottoman forces in the back. They created obstacles for the operations of the Ottoman units by cutting off their supply routes and destroying bridges and roads. ... They spied for Russia and by rebelling in the cities where they were located, they eased the way for the Russian invasion. ... Since the Armenians who engaged in massacres in collaboration with the Russians created a dangerous situation, this law required the migration of [Armenian people] from the towns they were living in to Syria, a safe Ottoman territory. ... Despite being in the midst of war, the Ottoman state took precautions and measures when it came to the Armenians who were migrating. Their tax payments were postponed, they were permitted to take any personal property they wished, government officials were assigned to ensure that they were protected from attacks during the journey and that their needs were met, police stations were established to ensure that their lives and properties were secure."


title: Historical negationism

text: Similar revisionist claims found in other textbooks by Akçam included that Armenian "back-stabbing" was the reason the Ottomans lost the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 (similar to the post-War German stab-in-the-back myth), that the Hamidian massacres never happened, that the Armenians were armed by the Russians during late World War I to fight the Ottomans (in reality they had already been nearly annihilated from the area by this point), that Armenians killed 600,000 Turks during said war, that the deportation were to save Armenians from other violent Armenian gangs, and that deported Armenians were later allowed to retrieve their possessions and return to Turkey unharmed. As of 2015, Turkish textbooks continue to refer to Armenians as "traitors," deny the genocide, and assert that the Ottoman Turks "took necessary measures to counter Armenian separatism". Students are taught that Armenians were forcibly relocated to defend Turkish nationals from attacks, and Armenians are described as "dishonorable and treacherous".


title: Historical negationism

text: Throughout the post war era, though Tito denounced nationalist sentiments in historiography, those trends continued with Croat and Serbian academics at times accusing each other of misrepresenting each other's histories, especially in relation to the Croat-Nazi alliance. Communist historiography was challenged in the 1980s and a rehabilitation of Serbian nationalism by Serbian historians began. Historians and other members of the intelligentsia belonging to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) and the Writers Association played a significant role in the explanation of the new historical narrative. The process of writing a "new Serbian history" paralleled alongside the emerging ethno-nationalist mobilization of Serbs with the objective of reorganizing the Yugoslav federation. Using ideas and concepts from Holocaust historiography, Serbian historians alongside church leaders applied it to World War Two Yugoslavia and equated the Serbs with Jews and Croats with Nazi Germans.


title: Historical negationism

text: Chetniks along with the Ustashe were vilified by Tito era historiography within Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, Serbian historians initiated the process of re-examining the narrative of how World War Two was told in Yugoslavia which was accompanied by the rehabilitation of Četnik leader Draža Mihailović. Monographs relating to Mihailović and the Četnik movement were produced by some younger historians who were ideologically close to it towards the end of the 1990s. Being preoccupied with the era, Serbian historians have looked to vindicate the history of the Chetniks by portraying them as righteous freedom fighters battling the Nazis while removing from history books the ambiguous alliances with the Italians and Germans. Whereas the crimes committed by Chetniks against Croats and Muslims in Serbian historiography are overall "cloaked in silence". During the Milošević era, Serbian history was falsified to obscure the role Serbian collaborators Milan Nedić and Dimitrije Ljotić played in cleansing Serbia's Jewish community, killing them in the country or deporting them to Eastern European concentration camps.


title: Historical negationism

text: In the 1990s following a massive Western media coverage of the Yugoslav Wars, there was a rise of the publications considering the matter on historical revisionism of former Yugoslavia. One of the most prominent authors on the field of historical revisionism in the 1990s considering the newly emerged republics is Noel Malcolm and his works "Bosnia: A Short History (1994)" and "Kosovo: A Short History (1998)", that have seen a robust debate among historians following their release; following the release of the latter, the merits of the book were the subject of an extended debate in "Foreign Affairs". Critics said that the book was "marred by his sympathies for its ethnic Albanian separatists, anti-Serbian bias, and illusions about the Balkans". In late 1999, Thomas Emmert of the history faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota reviewed the book in "Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans Online" and while praising aspects of the book also asserted that it was "shaped by the author's overriding determination to challenge Serbian myths", that Malcolm was "partisan", and also complained that the book made a "transparent attempt to prove that the main Serbian myths are false". In 2006, a study by Frederick Anscombe looked at issues surrounding scholarship on Kosovo such as Noel Malcolm's work "Kosovo: A Short History". Anscombe noted that Malcolm offered a "a detailed critique of the competing versions of Kosovo's history" and that his work marked a "remarkable reversal" of previous acceptance by Western historians of the "Serbian account" regarding the migration of the Serbs (1690) from Kosovo. Malcolm has been criticized for being "anti-Serbian" and selective like the Serbs with the sources, while other more restrained critics note that "his arguments are unconvincing". Anscombe noted that Malcolm, like Serbian and Yugoslav historians who have ignored his conclusions sideline and are unwilling to consider indigenous evidence such as that from the Ottoman archive when composing national history.


title: Historical negationism

text: On 23 February 2005, the Union for a Popular Movement conservative majority at the French National Assembly voted a law compelling history textbooks and teachers to "acknowledge and recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence abroad, especially in North Africa". It was criticized by historians and teachers, among them Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who refused to recognize the French Parliament's right to influence the way history is written (despite the French Holocaust denial laws, see "Loi Gayssot"). That law was also challenged by left-wing parties and the former French colonies; critics argued that the law was tantamount to refusing to acknowledge the racism inherent to French colonialism, and that the law proper is a form of historical revisionism.


title: Historical negationism

text: In the Philippines, the biggest examples of historical negationism are linked to the Marcos family dynasty, usually Imelda Marcos, Bongbong Marcos, and Imee Marcos specifically. They have been accused of denying or trivializing the human rights violations during martial law and the plunder of the Philippines' coffers while Ferdinand Marcos was president.


title: Historical negationism

text: A spin-off of the vision of history espoused by the "inclusive Spanish nationalism" built in opposition to the National-Catholic brand of Spanish nationalism, it was first coined by Ignacio Olagüe (a dilettante historian connected to the early Spanish fascism) particularly in the former's 1974 work "La revolución islámica en Occidente" ("The Islamic revolution in the West"). The negationist postulates of Olagüe were later adopted by certain sectors within Andalusian nationalism. These ideas were resurrected in the early 21st century by the Arabist Emilio González Ferrín.


title: Historical negationism

text: During the British colonization of Australia, the Indigenous Australian population drastically plummeted during the Australian frontier wars. Under the "terra nullius" doctrine, aboriginal people were regarded as lacking any concept of property rights and thus no treaty was ever signed to negotiate land from the native inhabitants. Massacres and mass poisonings have also been carried out against indigenous people during colonization as well. In addition, indigenous children were removed from their families in an assimilation project designed to absorb the native population into white society in an attempt to "breed out the color" in what's known as the Stolen Generations.


title: Historical negationism

text: After the release of the "Bringing Them Home" report in 1997, the John Howard administration denied that the Stolen Generations were committed with genocidal intent and refused to apologize for the program. Right-wing historians such as Keith Windschuttle have written books claiming that genocide against Indigenous Australians never happened, arguing that the mortality rates among aboriginal people during colonization were largely due to disease and that the Stolen Generations were actually committed with the intent to protect children from neglect in abusive families. Conservative historians have also claimed that the idea of a genocide against aboriginal people is a myth deliberately fabricated by orthodox historians in support of a "black armband" view of history conveying the message of white guilt.


title: Historical negationism

text: Some countries have criminalized historical revisionism of historic events such as the Holocaust. The Council of Europe defines it as the "denial, gross minimisation, approval or justification of genocide or crimes against humanity" (article 6, "Additional Protocol to the Convention on cybercrime").


title: Historical negationism

text: Some council-member states proposed an additional protocol to the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, addressing materials and "acts of racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer networks"; it was negotiated from late 2001 to early 2002, and, on 7 November 2002, the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers adopted the protocol's final text titled "Additional Protocol to the Convention on Cyber-crime, Concerning the Criminalisation of Acts of a Racist and Xenophobic Nature Committed through Computer Systems", ("Protocol"). It opened on 28 January 2003, and became current on 1 March 2006; as of 30 November 2011, 20 States have signed and ratified the Protocol, and 15 others have signed, but not yet ratified it (including Canada and South Africa).


title: Historical negationism

text: The Protocol requires participant States to criminalize the dissemination of racist and xenophobic material, and of racist and xenophobic threats and insults through computer networks, such as the Internet. Article 6, Section 1 of the Protocol specifically covers Holocaust Denial, and other genocides recognized as such by international courts, established since 1945, by relevant international legal instruments. Section 2 of Article 6 allows a Party to the Protocol, at their discretion, only to prosecute the violator if the crime is committed with the intent to incite hatred or discrimination or violence; or to use a reservation, by allowing a Party not to apply Article 6 – either partly or entirely. The Council of Europe's "Explanatory Report" of the Protocol says that the "European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that the denial or revision of 'clearly established historical facts – such as the Holocaust  –  ... would be removed from the protection of Article 10 by Article 17' of the European Convention on Human Rights" (see the "Lehideux and Isorni" judgement of 23 September 1998);


title: Historical negationism

text: Two of the English-speaking states in Europe, Ireland and the United Kingdom, have not signed the additional protocol, (the third, Malta, signed on 28 January 2003, but has not yet ratified it). On 8 July 2005 Canada became the only non-European state to sign the convention. They were joined by South Africa in April 2008. The United States government does not believe that the final version of the Protocol is consistent with the United States' First Amendment Constitutional rights and has informed the Council of Europe that the United States will not become a Party to the protocol.


title: Historical negationism

text: There are domestic laws against negationism and hate speech (which may encompass negationism) in several countries, including:


title: Historical negationism

text: Additionally, the Netherlands considers denying the Holocaust as a hate crime – which is a punishable offence. Wider use of domestic laws include the 1990 French "Gayssot Act" that prohibits any "racist, anti-Semitic or xenophobic" speech, and the Czech Republic and Ukraine have criminalized the denial and the minimization of Communist-era crimes.


title: Historical negationism

text: In the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) by George Orwell, the government of Oceania continually revises historical records to concord with the contemporary political explanations of The Party. When Oceania is at war with Eurasia, the public records (newspapers, cinema, television) indicate that Oceania has been always at war with Eurasia; yet, when Eurasia and Oceania are no longer fighting each other, the historical records are subjected to negationism; thus, the populace are brainwashed to believe that Oceania and Eurasia always have been allies against Eastasia. The protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, is an editor in the Ministry of Truth, responsible for effecting the continual historical revisionism that will negate the contradictions of the past upon the contemporary world of Oceania.


title: Historical negationism

text: To cope with the psychological stresses of life during wartime, Smith begins a diary, in which he observes that "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future", and so illustrates the principal, ideological purpose of historical negationism.


title: Historical negationism

text: Franz Kurowski was an extremely prolific right-wing German writer who dedicated his entire career to the production of Nazi military propaganda, followed by post-war military pulp fiction and revisionist histories of World War II, claiming the humane behaviour and innocence of war crimes of the "Wehrmacht", glorifying war as a desirable state, while fabricating eyewitness reports of atrocities allegedly committed by the Allies, especially Bomber Command and the air raids on Cologne and Dresden as a planned genocide of the civilian population.


title: Sonagachi

text: Sonagachi is a neighbourhood in Kolkata, India, located in North Kolkata near the intersection of Jatindra Mohan Avenue (north of C.R. Avenue) with Beadon Street and Sovabazar, about one kilometer north of the Marble Palace area. Sonagachi is among the largest red-light districts in Asia with several hundred multi-storey brothels residing more than 16,000 commercial sex workers.


title: Sonagachi

text: In Bengali, "Sona Gachi" means 'Tree of Gold'. According to legend, during the early days of Calcutta the area was the den of a notorious dacoit by the name of Sanaullah, who lived here with his mother. On his death, the grieving woman is said to have heard a voice coming from their hut, saying, “Mother, don’t cry. I have become a Gazi”, and so the legend of Sona Gazi started. The mother built a mosque in memory of her son, although it fell into disrepair. The Sona Gazi was converted into Sonagachi.


title: Sonagachi

text: Several NGOs and government organizations operate in Sonagachi for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) including AIDS. The book "Guilty Without Trial" by the founders of the NGO Sanlaap based much of their research into human trafficking in India on this area.