20 Denialism

In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.

"And yet it moves" or "Albeit it does move" is a phrase attributed to the Italian mathematician, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) in 1633 after being forced to recant his claims that the Earth moves around the Sun, rather than the converse. In this context, the implication of the phrase is: despite his recantation, the Church's proclamations to the contrary, or any other conviction or doctrine of men, the Earth does, in fact, move.

Anti-gay purges in Chechnya in the Chechen Republic, a part of the Russian Federation, have included forced disappearances—secret abductions, imprisonment, torture—and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation. An unknown number of people, who authorities detained on suspicion of being gay or bisexual, have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps.

The rejection of evolution by religious groups involves an ongoing, recurring cultural, political, and theological dispute about the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. In accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an empirical scientific fact.

Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. In its broadest sense, creationism includes a continuum of religious views, which vary in their acceptance or rejection of scientific explanations such as evolution that describe the origin and development of natural phenomena.

Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly.

Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science. The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.

The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it. The movement arose out of the creation science movement in the United States, and is driven by a small group of proponents.

Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of Lamarckism and exaggerated claims for the benefits of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.

Modern flat Earth beliefs are promoted by organizations and individuals which make claims that the Earth is flat while denying the Earth's sphericity, contrary to over two millennia of scientific consensus. Flat Earth beliefs are pseudoscience; the theories and assertions are not based on scientific knowledge. Flat Earth advocates are classified by experts in philosophy and physics as science deniers.

Moon landing conspiracy theories claim that some or all elements of the Apollo program and the associated Moon landings were hoaxes staged by NASA, possibly with the aid of other organizations. The most notable claim is that the six crewed landings (1969–1972) were faked and that twelve Apollo astronauts did not actually walk on the Moon. Various groups and individuals have made claims since the mid-1970s that NASA and others knowingly misled the public into believing the landings happened, by manufacturing, tampering with, or destroying evidence including photos, telemetry tapes, radio and TV transmissions, and Moon rock samples.

The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is the fictitious notion that the regular German armed forces were not involved in the Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The debunked myth, heavily promoted by German authors and military staff after WWII, completely denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and preparation of war crimes. Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of a war of extermination, particularly in the Soviet Union — where the Nazis viewed the population as "subhumans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators—has been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers", the Schutzstaffel (SS), and not the regular German military.

Noah's Ark Zoo Farm is a 100-acre (40 ha) zoo developed on a working farm in Wraxall, North Somerset, 6 miles (9.7 km) west of Bristol, England, which promotes a form of creationism that includes a belief that the biblical story of Noah's Flood was an actual cataclysmic event. In 2009 the zoo was expelled from the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the main industry regulatory body, "for bringing the association into disrepute", but in 2018 it regained membership in the body. The zoo has the largest elephant enclosure in northern Europe.

Ontogenetic depth is a pseudoscientific idea proposed in February 2003 by Paul Nelson, an American philosopher of science, young Earth creationist and intelligent design advocate; he is employed by the Discovery Institute.

Specified complexity is a creationist argument introduced by William Dembski, used by advocates to promote intelligent design. According to Dembski, the concept can formalize a property that singles out patterns that are both specified and complex, where in Dembski's terminology, a specified pattern is one that admits short descriptions, whereas a complex pattern is one that is unlikely to occur by chance. Proponents of intelligent design use specified complexity as one of their two main arguments, alongside irreducible complexity.

On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. Afterwards, the shooter allegedly fled the scene on foot by blending in with other students. The suspect, later identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, was arrested without incident about an hour later in nearby Coral Springs and subsequently charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Police and prosecutors have not offered a motive and are investigating "a pattern of disciplinary issues and unnerving behavior."

"Teach the Controversy" is a campaign, conducted by the Discovery Institute, to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while attempting to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. The campaign claims that fairness and equal time require educating students with a 'critical analysis of evolution' where "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" will be presented and evaluated alongside intelligent design concepts like irreducible complexity presented as a scientific argument against evolution through oblique references to books by design proponents listed in the bibliography of the Institute-proposed "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plans.

Volodymyr Mykhailovych Viatrovych is a Ukrainian historian, civic activist and politician.

Zersetzung is a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities.