Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know,
wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see ... these are all
expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their
condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's
infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing
their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their
responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum
deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and
denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to
intervene.
Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware
of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to
protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How
do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public's
apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always
so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity?
States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal
and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and
evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images
of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion
fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and
other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by
perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
