On April 10 and 11 at the University of Rome 3 (Dipartimento Fisolofia, Comunicazione, Spettacolo) the SISSCO, (Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea), will hold an important academic conference about the role of contemporary historians confronted with Holocaust denial on the web.
Should legislation be voted in Italy contrasting Holocaust Negationism? And, more generally, should History, when unable to build a firm culture of the past widely accepted in societies, be ruled by legislation?
These issues have
been discussed in many European countries; some laws aiming at governing
legally the past and telling about politically correct memories and what
exactly is the truth about the past, have been voted in France, in Spain, and
in other countries. Professional historians are generally against the idea to force societies to adopt a so-called "correct history of their pasts" defined by law and, in France, a committee was born using its own very active blog to contest the idea that telling the truth in history could be enforced by the law: the Comité de vigilance face aux usages publics de l'histoire (Committee of vigilance on the public use of history) wrote a manifesto on June 17, 2005 against the "entrepreneurs of memory" and political uses or misuses of history.
The debate has entered the public sphere in Italy too and the main association of contemporary history academic historians, Sissco, collected a "dossier" analyzing the press debate about holocaust denials and promoted an official petition signed by many contemporary historians against the use of the law in history: "Modifiche all'articolo 414 del codice penale in materia di negazione di crimini di guerra e di genocidio o contro l'umanità e di apologia di crimini di genocidio e crimini di guerra".
But the Holocaust of the Jews during the second world war is unique: should historians and the civil society accept that the Shoah be openly and publicly contested and denied and hate speech widely diffused through the Internet? Is it possible to use a penal legislation against negationist web contents published everywhere in the world and accessible also in Italy? Should the Italian
legislator vote a law defending the truth against offensive, racist and anti-Semitic revisionist
propaganda and condemn hate speech legally?
These activities and also the academic conference promoted in April in Rome described below, are showcasing the direct participation of academic historians in the policy in Italy, what was in the early '90 defined by Nicola Gallerano as being part of the "uso pubblico della storia". Will these political and academic activities be able to maintain also for the young generation the awareness of what happened in Europe during WW2 and about keeping alive a correct memory of the holocaust using properly the web?
It is of course my opinion that academic conferences are important but are not enough and that we need to act in the virtual space and promote the digital public history of the Shoah and of other genocides perpetrated by the Nazi and their allies looking at how best presenting the evidences of the Holocaust and engaging different communities about these issues.
It is of course my opinion that academic conferences are important but are not enough and that we need to act in the virtual space and promote the digital public history of the Shoah and of other genocides perpetrated by the Nazi and their allies looking at how best presenting the evidences of the Holocaust and engaging different communities about these issues.
Building awareness of the past using a public history approach is being done by the ERIH project (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) in Europe to support the Holocaust
research community, provide access to the primary sources dealing with the Holocaust and encourage
collaborative research in the field. What could be the role of public historians in maintaining a correct perception of what has been the Holocaust and engage with fighting negationism on the web? How could the web itself, and social media, in close contact with other public activities, fight back an aggressive negationist approach like what is diffused online in Metapedia, the so-called alternative encyclopedia if you look for the non-existing keyword "holocaust"?
Metapedians redirected the keyword "holocaust" -nothing to read about in a specific entry- to another Metapedia entry called "Jewish casualties during World War II" avoiding the use of what they call a useless and mystifying buzzword, the Holocaust of the Jews.
So I quote here a full paragraph (accessed on Wednesday March 12, 2014) of this entry in order to understand how far the negationist propaganda in the web can go, contradicting all the basic evidences of historical research and the memory of who suffered in the nazi camps. Reading this paragraph and the whole entry online, you will discover another history, the kind of narrative which is banned by law in other countries like in France and would be banned in Italy too voting a new legislation: "Some Jews controversially claim the German government had an "official policy" of extermination, where "6 million" were killed in homicidal gas chambers and turned into soap or lampshades. Confidence trickster, Elie Wiesel, applied the religious term "The Holocaust" to this framing in the 1970s. Since then, the construct has been used as a political weapon to promote Germanophobia and Europhobia in general. It is used as moral justification for the Zionist war on the Palestinians, as well as part of an illustrious money-making industry. In some countries it is illegal for historians and investigators to openly state a dissenting view and some have been incarcerated for thought criminality as prisoners of conscience."
So I quote here a full paragraph (accessed on Wednesday March 12, 2014) of this entry in order to understand how far the negationist propaganda in the web can go, contradicting all the basic evidences of historical research and the memory of who suffered in the nazi camps. Reading this paragraph and the whole entry online, you will discover another history, the kind of narrative which is banned by law in other countries like in France and would be banned in Italy too voting a new legislation: "Some Jews controversially claim the German government had an "official policy" of extermination, where "6 million" were killed in homicidal gas chambers and turned into soap or lampshades. Confidence trickster, Elie Wiesel, applied the religious term "The Holocaust" to this framing in the 1970s. Since then, the construct has been used as a political weapon to promote Germanophobia and Europhobia in general. It is used as moral justification for the Zionist war on the Palestinians, as well as part of an illustrious money-making industry. In some countries it is illegal for historians and investigators to openly state a dissenting view and some have been incarcerated for thought criminality as prisoners of conscience."
Digital Public Historians are present in other countries and monitoring this "negationist web" which engages -systematically in the case of Metapedia- in rewriting the past, all the past and supports nationalistic, fascist and Neo-Nazi ideologies. These holocaust deniers are using the web from many years now. They have embraced the web as their elected media to communicate a false narrative of many pasts in the Metapedia, not only about the Holocaust, and remove memories and evidences of scientific historical research from the web, when these results are not supporting their goals. These political propagandists are using the architecture and stylistic presentation of Wikipedia together with the so-called "objective way to present facts" that Wikipedia has promoted from its creation in 2001 to give a semblance of truth to their discourses and misuses of memories.
ERIH has already organized an important international conference in July 2013 about Public History of the Holocaust: Historical Research in the Digital Age "that was hosted by the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Facilitated by EHRI and
two other European infrastructure projects supporting humanities
research, DARIAH and TextGrid,
and sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research, the
conference brought together policy makers, archival and memory
institutions, and academics to reflect on the challenges and
opportunities the digital age offers for the public history of the
Holocaust."
Negationism in the digital realm was one of the central issue of this discussion. Georgi Verbeeck, Professor of German History at the University of
Leuven, "...reflecting on the
continuing problem of Holocaust negationism, arrived at a nuanced
assessment of the efficacy of current research and educational practices
to prevent similar atrocities from re-occurring. Many small narratives
of concrete experiences may provide powerful mirrors that can spur
individuals to effective responses and positive actions...." What is important to quote from Verbeeck's speech about how to use and promote the sources and memories of the Shoah in the digital realm, reflects on the fact that "the web is
particularly suited to organise and publish [...] small narratives".
The concluding debates were saying about "the effectiveness of legal tools to counter internet hate speech; the
opportunities and limits of the digital environment for tackling new
historical questions; the ever present danger of a (digital)
de-historicisation and de-contextualisation of Holocaust discourse."
We may hope that the Rome conference in April 2014 will engage with the later issues dealing with
the
digital public history of the Holocaust.
 |
| http://online.ibc.regione.emilia-romagna.it/h3/h3.exe/apubblicazioni/Fanalisi |
The web is easily accessible for everybody to produce its own vision of the past and is able to promote and diffuse alternative memories, something that I have explained in my essay in French, La digital history : histoire et mémoire à la portée de tous.
So, the important conference in Rome will go forward in an extended academic reflection dealing with how the web could be used and misused to promote everybody's memory and vision of the past and contrast hate speech and holocaust deniers activities in the digital realm.
This is the full program of the conference:
This is the full program of the conference:
Shoah e
negazionismo nel Web: una sfida per gli storici
Roma, 10 e 11 aprile
2014
Università
Roma Tre
Sede della Camera dei deputati
Giovedì 10 aprile 2014
(sede
Università Roma Tre)
14,30
Mario Panizza, Rettore Università degli studi
Roma Tre*
Paolo D'Angelo, Direttore Dipartimento
filosofia comunicazione spettacolo
Agostino Giovagnoli, Presidente Società
italiana per lo studio della Storia contemporanea
15,00
La storia, le memorie e la didattica nel Web
Presiede Michele Sarfatti (Fondazione Centro
di documentazione ebraica contemporanea)
Alberto Cavaglion (Università di Firenze)
Usi e abusi della memoria
Guri Schwarz (University of California, Los
Angeles)
La legge di Godwin:la Shoah nella rete e
nell'immaginario collettivo
Laura Fontana (Memorial de la Shoah, Paris)
La trasmissione della Shoah nell'era virtuale:
una deriva della lezione su Auschwitz?
Damiano Garofalo (Museo della Shoah, Roma)
Fonti orali, audiovisive e memoria della Shoah
nel web e nel digitale
David Meghnagi (Università Roma Tre)
L'esperienza del Master “Didattica della
Shoah” di Roma Tre
Laura Brazzo (Fondazione Centro di
documentazione ebraica contemporanea)
I Linked Open Data per la storia della Shoah.
Verso il Web 3.0
18,00
dibattito
Venerdì 11 aprile 2014
9,30
L'universo digitale del negazionismo
Presiede Renato Moro (Università Roma Tre)
Claudio Vercelli (Istituto di studi storici
Gaetano Salvemini)
Il negazionismo nel web
Valentina Pisanty (Università di Bergamo)
I linguaggi del negazionismo nel web
Gabriele Rigano (Università per stranieri,
Perugia)
I circuiti del negazionismo tra carta stampata
e web
Emiliano Perra (University of Winchester)
Negazionismo e web: il caso inglese
Valeria Galimi (Università della Tuscia)
Leggi memoriali, negazionismo e web: la
discussione in Francia
12,00
dibattito
14,30
(Sala
Zuccari, Palazzo Giustiniani, Via della Dogana Vecchia da confermare)
Introduce
Ernesto De Cristofaro (Università di Catania)
La legislazione in Europa e in Italia
Contro il negazionismo: Una legge utile o
dannosa?
Tavola rotonda
presiede Tommaso Detti
partecipano:
Marcello Flores, Anna Rossi Doria ed altri,
* In attesa di conferma
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