Abstract:
Among the major ethical-political challenges of historiography in the 21st century are the practices of falsifying and manipulating the past. This article proposes the category of distortionism, pointing out its particularity in relation to revisionism and negationism and offering examples of its applicability, taking the Brazilian military dictatorship as a field of analysis. The article discusses and suggests a rearrangement of the contents attributed to those concepts, seeking to specify the boundaries between legitimate operations and abusive ones in the examination of the past. It justifies the pertinence of the category distortionism by arguing that it allows for greater conceptual precision in the task of characterizing and historicizing the rhetorical strategies used to misrepresent history, which are not reduced neither to operations of denying consolidated historical events and processes nor revising interpretations of the past.
Keywords:
Negationism; Uses of the past; Historical manipulation