The Epistemic Threat: Why Holocaust Denial is the Prototype for Authoritarian Pseudoscience
Holocaust denial is universally condemned as a vile and inflammatory expression of antisemitism, a deliberate injury to the memory of six million Jewish victims and millions of others murdered by the Nazi regime. Yet, to categorize it merely as anti-Jewish hate speech is to miss its deeper, more corrosive function. Holocaust denial is, at its core, a political act of pseudoscience and historical negationism. It is an organized attack on the very concept of verifiable truth, and its danger lies not just in the historical facts it seeks to erase, but in the blueprint it provides for dismantling the shared reality necessary for a free society. The falsification of history is the main negative trait of this denialism, serving as a gateway drug to the acceptance of authoritarian ideologies.
