Official denial of a harm facilitates its expansion and sanction
Evidence
Perhaps denying the existence of something is what enables it to swell, spread, and garner sanction. This was true for French and American politicians’ claim that “racism does not exist” because their societies were, magically, colorblind. Or more ominously, when the Chinese government expels all foreign journalists and brazenly claims, despite mounting evidence, that there is “no such thing as [Muslim] detention camps” in the country. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 347
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- QUESTION: The Chinese detention-camp denial is a striking factual reference worth verifying and potentially chasing the news chronology on.
- XREF: Directly serves the reader’s guiding question about states learning Islamophobic techniques from one another — France, the US, and China sharing a denial playbook.
- SEED: An essay angle: the ‘denial as enabler’ mechanism — how governments across three continents deploy the same ‘racism does not exist’ strategy, and what it reveals about the global structure of tolerated hate.