We’re living through an age of negationism – the deliberate distortion or denial of established historical facts for ideological or political purposes.
Unlike legitimate historical revisionism, which reexamines the past in light of new evidence, negationism lies to promote an agenda. The most obvious and extreme example is Holocaust denial – long the project of neo-Nazis and other rabid antisemites.
But there are more subtle varieties, cloaked in respectable language and political debate. These are harder to spot, and in some ways more dangerous.
A case in point is an essay in the August 19 online edition of The New York Times likening the Yalta Conference of 1945 to the Munich Agreement of 1938 and using that frame to interpret the Zelensky summit at the White House (”The Real Meaning of the Zelensky Summit Was Not as It Appeared,” by opinion columnist Masha Gessen).
The contrast between those two turning points in history couldn’t be starker.
Munich was appeasement of Nazi Germany – the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the hope of buying “peace for our time,” as British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Neville Chamberlain declared less than a year before Germany’s invasion of Poland began World War II. The pact was capitulation by the European democracies to a totalitarian power bent on conquest.
Yalta, by contrast, was a wartime summit among the Allies engaged in a fight to the death against that very enemy and its Axis partners – a global conflict that might have been avoided if Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, the Radical-Socialist (Center-Left) Prime Minister of France, had not caved to Hitler’s demands in 1938.
To equate Munich and Yalta isn’t just sloppy history. It erases the essential difference between surrender and solidarity in the face of total war.
This same false narrative appears in the oft-repeated claim that the Allies divided Europe without consulting the countries affected. The argument conveniently forgets that many of those countries had produced collaborationist regimes or participated in the Nazi war effort and genocidal slaughter of their Jewish populations. And Germany, of course, which the Allies divided, was the aggressor. To recast the defeated or complicit as innocent victims cheated at Yalta perverts the historical record.
Negationism now comes from both extremes of the political spectrum. On the right, isolationists and antisemites have gone so far as to argue that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the true villain of the war – a grotesque falsification promoted by certain podcasts and platforms.
A blatant example: During a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, tenured Cornell University Chemistry Professor David Collum said America “should have sided with Hitler.”
On the left, radical theorists such as Columbia University’s tenured professor Mahmoud Mamdani – father of the anti-Zionist New York City mayoralty candidate Zohran Mamdani – claim the Allies were as racist as the Nazis.
The far right dresses its lies in antiwar rhetoric. The far left cloaks its lies in the jargon of post-colonial theory. Both belong to the same upside-down world where democracies and liberators are painted as no better – or even worse – than dictatorships and mass murderers.
The same impulse has targeted American history, where left-wing extremists recast Abraham Lincoln not as the Great Emancipator but as a warmonger. What once was the exclusive rhetoric of diehard apologists for slavery and the Confederacy now finds echo in leftwing academic circles.
Again, the pattern is the same – inverting history to turn liberators into oppressors.
Nowhere is this more dangerous than in its application to the Zionist movement and the founding of the State of Israel. Once widely recognized as one of history’s moral triumphs – the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the Biblical and historical homeland of the Jewish people after millennia of exile and persecution culminating in the Holocaust – Zionism is increasingly recast as a settler-colonial project. According to this treacherous tale, it wasn’t the return of the Jewish people to their land but an imperialist venture imposed by Western powers.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, whose attachment to the Land of Israel was never broken. A remnant remained through centuries of conquest and exile, with periodic inflows and resettlements long before modern political Zionism. The Balfour Declaration and later international recognition were not acts of colonial fiat but acknowledgments of Jewish continuity, self-determination, sacrifice – and need. To label this as colonialism is to erase Jewish history, deny Jewish peoplehood and delegitimize Israel’s very existence.
This convergence of left-wing post-colonial hostility and right-wing isolationist contrarianism is no accident. Both seek to weaken the moral authority of the democratic West. Both rely on the same strategy: rewriting history to strip away legitimacy from those who defeated tyranny and built free societies. The aim is to cast light as darkness and darkness as light.
The past is complex, but complexity is no excuse for distortion and disinformation. Munich was appeasement; Yalta wasn’t. The Allies were liberators, not moral equivalents of the Nazis. Lincoln was the emancipator. And the realization of the Zionist dream was the remarkable rebirth – against all odds – of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. To deny these truths is poisonous, willful falsification of history.
