Fascinating & alarming analysis of denialism in its myriad forms:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth
There are multiple kinds of denialists:
from those who are sceptical of all established knowledge,
to those who challenge one type of knowledge;
from those who actively contribute to the creation of denialist scholarship,
to those who quietly consume it;
from those who burn with certainty,
to those who are privately sceptical about their scepticism.
What they all have in common, I would argue, is a particular type of desire.
This desire – for something not to be true – is the driver of denialism.
Denialism is a post‑enlightenment phenomenon,
a reaction to the “inconvenience” of many of the findings of modern scholarship.
The discovery of evolution, for example, is inconvenient to those committed to a literalist biblical account of creation.
Denialism is also a reaction to the inconvenience of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world.
In the ancient world, you could erect a monument proudly proclaiming the genocide you committed to the world.
In the modern world, mass killing, mass starvation, mass environmental catastrophe can no longer be publicly legitimated.
Yet many humans still want to do the same things humans always did.
We are still desiring beings.
We want to murder, to steal, to destroy and to despoil.
We want to preserve our ignorance and unquestioned faith.
So when our desires are rendered unspeakable in the modern world, we are forced to pretend that we do not yearn for things we desire.
...
Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour.