Editing Historical negationism (section)

==Purposes==
Usually, the purpose of historical negation is to achieve a national, political aim, by transferring war guilt, demonizing an enemy, providing an illusion of victory, or preserving a friendship.{{citation needed|date=July 2023}}

===Ideological influence===
{{See also|Social influence|War of ideas}}
The principal functions of negationist history are the abilities to control ideological and political influence.

History is a social resource that contributes to shaping [[national identity]], culture, and the public memory. Through the study of history, people are imbued with a particular cultural identity; therefore, by negatively revising history, the negationist can craft a specific, ideological identity. Because historians are credited as people who single-mindedly pursue truth, by way of fact, negationist historians capitalize on the historian's [[Reputation|professional credibility]], and present their [[pseudohistory]] as true scholarship. By adding a measure of credibility to the work of revised history, the ideas of the negationist historian are more readily accepted in the public mind. As such, professional historians recognize the revisionist practice of historical negationism as the work of "truth-seekers" finding different truths in the historical record to fit their political, social, and ideological contexts.{{citation needed|date=July 2023}}

===Political influence===
History provides insight into past political policies and consequences, and thus assists people in extrapolating political implications for contemporary society. Historical negationism is applied to cultivate a specific [[political myth]], sometimes with official consent from the government, whereby self-taught, amateur, and dissident academic [[historian]]s either manipulate or misrepresent historical accounts to achieve political ends. For example, after the late 1930s in the [[Soviet Union]], the [[ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] and [[historiography in the Soviet Union]] treated [[reality]] and the [[Party line (politics)|party line]] as the same intellectual entity, especially in regards to the [[Russian Civil War]] and peasant rebellions;<ref>Taisia Osipova, "Peasant rebellions: Origin, Scope, Design and Consequences", in Vladimir N. Brovkin (ed.), ''The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars'', Yale University Press, 1997, {{ISBN|0-300-06706-2}}. pp. 154–76.</ref> Soviet historical negationism advanced a specific, political, and ideological agenda about Russia and its place in world history.<ref>Roger D. Markwick, Donald J. Raleigh, ''Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, {{ISBN|0-333-79209-2}}, pp. 4–5.</ref>