In Defense of Denying Atrocities

Against the asymmetry

Noam Chomsky is a controversial figure. One of the primary charges that his critics routinely make is that he’s a genocide revisionist. During the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities, Chomsky apparently disagreed with some reports of the numbers, thinking they were likely overblown; the numbers proved correct. Many people take this to be a serious offense, akin to holocaust denial.

This feature of public discourse is not limited to Chomsky. Suppose that Agrabah fights a war with Vartustan, during the course of which 200,000 people are killed. Next imagine that there are two public intellectuals: one of whom says that probably around 80,000 people were killed, and the other says that 800,000 people were killed.

The second one might be criticized as a shoddy historian. Many might chide them for their factual errors. Still, the first would be subject to orders of magnitude more vitriol—the knives would really come out for them. They’d be accused of being a revisionist or a denier of atrocities, which is one of the worst things that one can be. Overestimating the scale of atrocities might be a serious error, but it’s not seen as the sort of career-ruining sin that underplaying atrocities is.

When Chomsky underestimates the scale of the atrocities of our enemies, he’s pilloried as some putrid villain. Yet if he’d overstated our atrocities—say, overestimating the degree of killing in East Timor carrier out by Suharto with U.S. arms—such an error would be nowhere near as significant a stain on his reputation.

This seems to be a quite bizarre and irrational feature of political conversations. If it’s a sin to underestimate but not to overestimate, then we should expect various problems to be overestimated. Banning type 1 errors but not type 2 errors is a recipe for type 2 errors.

When a person argues that climate change is non-existent, not primarily human-caused, or fairly insignificant, they’re called a climate change denier. Being a “denier” of any serious problem is quite a major offense. Yet when people claim, like Greta Thunberg does, that climate change is likely to kill everyone on Earth, she’s not subjected to the same kind of ridicule. Surely the difference between “X is a problem on the level of malaria,” and “X will kill everyone” is bigger than the difference between “X is a problem on the level of malaria,” and “X isn’t a problem.”

It’s quite an odd state of affairs when denying a problem is seen as far less serious than confidently predicting based on quite shoddy evidence that it will kill everyone—leading to most children predicting that climate change will end the species, and many thinking they won’t live more than roughly another decade. How is it that the people who overestimate a problem by ten orders of magnitude, adopting a position wildly out of accordance with the scientific consensus, are seen as those on the side of science—certainly more so than the deniers?

Now, there are cases where denying atrocities is more serious than overestimating atrocities. If a person claimed, for instance, that 18 million Jews died in the holocaust, while we might think them an incompetent historian, they’re unlikely to have the same anti-semitic motivation as one who underplays atrocities. Sometimes underplaying atrocities reveals a wicked character in a way that overplaying atrocities doesn’t.

But this is only true sometimes. If, for instance, someone claimed there were serious Jewish atrocities carried out against the Germans, they’d similarly be open to charges of anti-semitism. Rather than treating denying or downplaying atrocities as a categorically different offense than overplaying them, we should simply look at the context. If Chomsky’s arguments for smaller numbers are bad, perhaps we should think him a less reliable source, inclined to overestimate our atrocities and underestimate those of our enemies, but there’s no reason to group those who make such errors in with holocaust deniers, for instance. If Chomsky underestimated the scale of death from the Cambodian genocide, we shouldn’t think that a considerably more serious offense than overestimating the scale of deaths in Laos or East Timor (NOTE: I’m not saying he did overestimate the scale of deaths in those places, but making a point about how underplaying atrocities should be treated).

There are lots of things that would be bad if they were real but we should deny. For instance, I deny that there’s an epidemic of consensual sex acts that go against one’s proper function, as the natural law theorists claim—in fact, I think there are no such sex acts. We’ll inevitably overrate problems if we treat underestimating them as evil and overestimating them as fine.

We should treat underestimating and overestimating atrocities as roughly symmetrical. An atrocity denier shouldn’t be treated, absent a good reason, as an overzealous atrocity affirmer. Both are errors, both might be indicative of corrupt character, and both might not.

In light of this, please let me know which atrocities I should deny. Currently leaning towards the mostly peaceful An Lushan rebellion.