I’ve been struck recently by something that doesn’t quite add up.

In 2026, some things are endlessly questioned, relativised, picked apart. Others are treated as so obvious they barely need saying. This isn’t about evidence — we have more of that than ever. It’s about something else. Something to do with who carries a thing, and who doesn’t.

Once you notice it, the pattern stops being subtle.

Two histories, two very different fates

Take two catastrophes.

The Holocaust is one of the most documented events in human history. It is taught, commemorated, ritualised, institutionalised. It sits at the moral centre of post-war Europe. And yet - increasingly - it is doubted, minimised, or quietly denied.

The Irish famine is older. It lacks the same global architecture of memory. There are no international famine museums, no annual global ceremonies, no universal moral script. And yet famine denial in Ireland essentially doesn’t exist.

That asymmetry is striking.

If time were the explanation, it should be the other way around.

Time isn’t the variable

The famine ended a century before the Holocaust began. And yet, within Ireland at least, no serious culture of denial has emerged. People argue - sometimes fiercely - about causes, culpability, and framing. But not about whether it happened, or whether the numbers were “overblown.”

Which suggests that time alone doesn’t erode truth.

Something else does.

Belief versus inheritance

Here’s the distinction that seems to matter.

Some histories are believed. Others are inherited.

Believed histories live in:

  • textbooks
  • museums
  • lessons
  • ceremonies

Inherited histories live in:

  • missing relatives
  • altered family trees
  • emigration stories
  • land ownership
  • absence

You can disagree with a belief. You cannot debate an absence.

In Ireland, the famine isn’t primarily remembered as a historical episode. It’s remembered as structure: population graphs that never recover, townlands that emptied, families that exist in Boston and Chicago because they don’t exist here.

You don’t assent to that. You grow up inside it.

Who actually does the denying

Once you see this, another pattern becomes hard to ignore.

Denial almost always comes from people without legacy.

Jews do not deny the Holocaust. Irish people do not deny the famine.

Denial clusters among those for whom these events are abstract - things encountered through screens, narratives, or arguments, rather than family consequence.

This isn’t a moral judgement. It’s a structural observation.

Denial is easiest when nothing in your life would change if you were wrong.

Institutions make memory visible - and brittle

There’s a cruel irony here.

The Holocaust is remembered so well institutionally because legacy alone could not carry it globally. Institutions stepped in to do necessary work: archiving, teaching, naming, commemorating.

But institutional memory is a kind of prosthetic. It works — and it is essential — but it is also fragile.

When trust in institutions collapses, anything they insist on too firmly starts to feel negotiable. Ritual becomes repetition. Repetition becomes suspicion.

What was meant to preserve memory becomes, paradoxically, a point of attack.

What denial feeds on

Denial doesn’t require hatred. That’s the uncomfortable part.

It feeds on:

  • abstraction
  • distance
  • zero personal cost
  • the posture of skepticism
  • the incentives of attention

In an algorithmic culture, inversion is rewarded. Questioning consensus signals independence. “Just asking questions” sounds virtuous - even when the questions have answers measured in millions of documents and bones.

Once a truth becomes purely conceptual, it becomes optional.

Denial is now a posture, not a position

Holocaust denial remains inseparable from antisemitism - that fact cannot be softened or sidestepped. Jews carry a unique and ongoing burden here, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

But the recent growth of denial cannot be explained by antisemitism alone.

Increasingly, the same people who deny the Holocaust also deny the moon landings, deny elections, deny basic historical facts - deny anything that arrives with institutional confidence attached to it. The specific claim matters less than the stance. The object of denial is interchangeable; the posture is constant.

This doesn’t dilute the seriousness of Holocaust denial. It sharpens it. It means people can drift into it without ever consciously choosing an ideology, carried instead by a broader collapse in how shared reality is maintained.

What denial can’t touch

There are things denial doesn’t work on.

Land. Diaspora. Family absence. Structural after-effects.

Scars don’t get debated. They don’t need defending. They simply persist, quietly shaping everything around them.

The famine survives denial not because it is better remembered, but because it is harder to extract from lived consequence - just as the Holocaust is for Jews.

The inversion of objectivity

One of the strangest features of 2026 is this:

Those furthest from consequence increasingly claim objectivity.

Distance is mistaken for clarity. Emotional investment is framed as bias. Absence of cost is mistaken for insight.

But not having inherited the loss doesn’t make you clearer. It just makes disbelief cheaper.

A simple rule, stated calmly

Truths don’t decay randomly.

They decay when denial is free. They persist when denial is costly.

This applies far beyond history.

Why this matters

If truth stability depends on inheritance, and inheritance thins with time, then more and more realities are quietly entering the danger zone.

Not because evidence is lacking. Not because hatred is louder. But because belief has become optional where legacy has faded.

That is an unsettling place to be.

And it’s where we are.