All true, but deniers are utterly addicted to playing on the ignorance of the 'man in the street' to mobilise resentment against the eggheads who supposedly have 'kept something hidden'.
Here is a chimp on another forum, trying to spell out the "method":
You have to explain that there isn't 1 History, but 3.
1) Revisionism. You have to say: we don't consider Revisionism now. No Revisionism.
2) The official History. We now will speak only about official History.
3) The history that 99,9% knows. It isn't the official History. It is mostly fantasy, films, tales and so on.
Then you can explain the hundreds of things that are in the official history and are so different from the films and the tales And also those hidden to the people. There are so many. You have to explain the difference between reality and tales, a scholar, you explain, must say what, how, when, how much... So you slowly show a real camp, a real crematorium, a real forced labour, you speak about the orders, the bureocracy. In the real life there were orders, plans, etc.... You are protected because you are speaking only relating on official history, not Revisionism. So the guy in front will have to think: "why I'didnt know?" "Why someone hide to me?" This is the first step to get because the burden now isn't upon you (the bad Revisionist). It is upon the good boys who hid so many arguments, or distorted them. May be they weren't so good. You are winning the first round, i.e you are titled to speak and listened with respect. The first step. Revisionism is later. Slowly.
There are of course a number of things wrong with this.
Firstly, there is no such thing as "official history", especially not with an international event, in the manner implied by the chimp above. Wars generate official histories commissioned by governments to detail one side's participation. But military history is also studied and researched at universities without any government directives, and it's most especially researched by probably 1000s of amateurs who have written a truly staggering number of books on different conflicts.
The Holocaust is no different. Yad Vashem can be considered an official Israeli government agency and its products could just about at a stretch be considered 'official'. But YV is hardly alone in writing about the Holocaust. It is just one more research unit producing output, no more and no less.
YV is slowly producing a series entitled the 'Comprehensive History of the Holocaust', one volume was written by Christopher Browning, an American historian with the University of North Carolina. Browning repeats many points and arguments he made in writings stretching back over a quarter of a century, without any 'official' stamp of approval. His interpretations are moreover contested very publicly and visibly within the field by other historians. Christian Gerlach flatly disagrees with Browning on his interpretation of the Eichmann interrogations, and published to this effect in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. HGS may be sponsored by USHMM which in turn is a federal government agency, but this does not mean that Gerlach's interpretation is all of a sudden the official US stance on the topic of Eichmann's testimony whereas Browning's is the official Israeli stance. Browning actually went into even more detail on Eichmann in a book published by the University of Chicago Press. Other historians - British and German among others - have similarly published about Eichmann for all manner of presses, including straight commercial publishers w/o a university press tag.
A historian, even a lowly undergraduate, encounters all these arguments as an ongoing debate over interpretations, as a historiographical controversy. Students might be set contrasting texts arguing different positions, specifically in order to get them to weigh up and evaluate conflicting interpretations. In the safety of the classroom, it actually doesn't matter as much whether they 'agree' with one or the other position so much as they can justify
why they agree or disagree. This simple but effective technique is used with virtually every topic imaginable. Nowhere in such discussions would it be even vaguely relevant whether the interpretation was published "officially" or by a university press, as long as the field recognised the interpretation of being worthy of inclusion. In some cases - as with Goldhagen - obviously wrong interpretations are still taught in contrast to other interpretations because they are
provocatively wrong.
Thus, asking an academic historian which interpretation of what facts might be definitive is actually fairly dumb. They might prefer one over the other, and use their preferences in their own work - in my case, for example, I would very much argue against Browning on a number of points - but they are not in the business of dictating an "official" history.
Secondly, the chimp has the sweet and touching notion that the powers that be, historians, whoever, are somehow hiding things, when in actual fact information about the past, including the Holocaust, has never been more open than it is right now. Google books gives everyone a free glimpse into academic texts should they wish, amazon delivers them to your doorstep in a matter of a few days, the much berated Wikipedia references a great many texts in considerable detail, and if you can read de.wikipedia or fr.wikipedia then you get even more references from them as well. For the Holocaust, the situation is even more open because in the past 10 years a vast amount of material has been scanned and uploaded to the internet, the entire run of Nuremberg volumes (Blue, Red, Green series) can be downloaded, digital libraries make available a great many key texts from the 1940s onwards, and other websites scan and upload a great many documents and other books.
The only conceivable sense in which information can be considered occult is if the chimp decides
not to look up the facts through the regular channels. Reading, and research, is no different to the six degrees of separation game. A single decently researched book will point you at, usually, another 200-500 other books and articles, which in turn point you to a similar number of publications, and so on. All too often, what is supposedly 'hidden' turns out to be in plain sight, what is 'mysterious' is anything but to someone familiar with the subject, what is 'distorted' is simply the strawman in the chimp's own head.
It is the sheerest ignorance and laziness to contrast populist misconceptions and strawmen against scholarship and think that there is anything unusual about this. Virtually every subject has its misconceptions and myths - the Poles did not charge German tanks with lances in 1939, for example - and their persistence does not signify anything at all about what happened in the past. Collective memory/popular understanding =/= history.
What these denier strawmen about 'official history' and the 'history that everyone knows' reveal is only the utter irrelevance of revisionism to proper scholarship. It's hardly a secret that the media can aid in the persistence of populist myths and misconceptions. The hopeless populism of denial may be mimicked in other CTs and other forms of woo, and it may indeed be the reason why maybe a few people each year decide to drink this particular brand of Kool-Aid. But you have to be extremely thick to think that wailing endlessly about what the media know about history is actually addressing the subject honestly and properly.
