Here are the signs: refusing to talk about a problem and shutting it out of your mind, blaming others for causing it, feeling helpless while rejecting help, continuing as if things are normal when they’re clearly not.
Health professionals say that denial – the state of mind where reality is ignored – can give us time to adjust to sudden change, but otherwise it’s all bad. If we fail to face reality and work out how to deal with it, we’re digging ourselves deeper into a hole.
Most of us have been deniers at times when confronted with an awkward reality. The issues are mostly small and passing, but they can lead to financial loss, fractured relationships and poor health, mental and physical.
When big groups or whole populations turn away from reality, their state of mind can spread like cancer. Denial hasn’t yet overwhelmed us, but it has surely never been as pervasive, as ubiquitous, as rampant as it is right now.
And nowhere is it more dangerous than in the US. In established democracies most leaders accept election results when they lose, but not Donald Trump. His failed coup attempt in 2020 has informed him and his acolytes that if they hold to the big lie that they won they can take power again, which puts US democracy in grave danger.
Mass denial is nothing new. Antisemitism goes back millennia, but the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered in the space of less than a decade, took it to a new level.
After Germany’s defeat, pro-Nazi revisionists sought to rewrite history by claiming there was no Holocaust, or more subtly, that facts were distorted to make it seem worse than it was. From the late 1940s stories were crafted, each building on earlier accounts, to spread the “news” that Jews and Communists were false witnesses and the Holocaust was a product of anti-German propaganda.
All this fed into what became an exercise in rewriting history, nurturing a global culture of denial about what really happened to Jews under the Nazis. Holocaust denialism, fed by the festering wounds of endless Israel-Arab conflict, has now taken root in the Muslim world.
Denialism crosses all boundaries. When World War I broke out in 1914 just 6 per cent of the 750,000 people living in Turkish-ruled Palestine were Jewish, nearly all of them recent immigrants from Europe. The other 94 per cent were indigenous Arabs.
But in Zionist tradition Palestine is really Israel, God’s Promised Land, in which Arabs have no place. Rising Jewish immigration saw armed Zionist militants ousting Arabs from their homes in the late 1940s, killing many in the process. By 1950 that process of ethnic cleansing, continued by the army of the new state of Israel, had seen three-quarters of all Arab Palestinians dispossessed. Palestinians know this time as the Nakba – the Catastrophe.
This significant fact, a blot on Israeli history and a forbidden topic among most Israelis and Jews abroad, is absent from all public discussion in the West of that region’s endless conflict. Yet the Nakba and subsequent decades of dispossession and blockade say a lot about that shocking day of rape, murder and abduction last October – and about the war that followed.
The Holocaust and the Nakba are just two examples of mass denialism. Antiquity aside, we could start in 1915 with Armenian refugees, then go on to the Holodomor, Nanjing, Indonesian communists, Bangladeshi separatists, Khmer Rouge, Tiananmen Square, Khojaly, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Tamils, Rohingya… look them up. That’s besides what colonialism did to indigenous peoples, Australia’s included.
It’s one thing to be in denial about ourselves, or about what people do to other people. But being in denial about what people are doing to the planet, home to all the life we know, is another thing altogether.
Climate denial takes many forms. There are those who simply reject decades of painstaking scientific research and mountains of irrefutable evidence – with daily updates – that we’re in a climate emergency that is steadily getting worse and that the supports and guardrails for business as usual, based on the physical world we used to inhabit, are falling away one by one.
But the real concern is leaders who say they believe the science but then ignore the clear imperative for urgent, top-order action. When leaders can’t accept this and act accordingly, they’re in a state of denial. Just like the Turks about Armenia, Communists about the Holodomor, Japan about Nanjing, Nazi apologists about the Holocaust, China about Tiananmen Square, Israel about the Nakba – and Australians about Aboriginal dispossession.
Every act to prolong the illusion of business as usual – every new drilling licence or gas export permit – is an act of denial, another nail in the coffin of a stable climate and a secure future.