Richard Rampton, the libel lawyer who took on Holocaust denial in his capacity as a barrister, passed away late last year. He was 82. His antagonist was the long term Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathiser David Irving. Irving, in 1996, sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin publishers for defamation. Why? Irving contended that Lipstadt, by referring to him as a Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist, had defamed him.

The object of Irving’s irritation was the 1993 book by Lipstadt entitled Denying the Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory. A sweeping analysis of the burgeoning phenomenon of Holocaust denial and its basis in antisemitism and Nazi philosophy, the book made mention of numerous Holocaust deniers, and the role they played in rehabilitating Nazism. If the enormous guilt of the Holocaust could be removed from the shoulders of the Nazi regime, then the ideology which underpinned that regime would be easier to rehabilitate.

Irving was mentioned, among others, as a prolific author of books which denied or minimised the Holocaust, and praised the leading figures of the Nazi regime. Incensed, Irving launched defamation proceedings – and Richard Rampton stepped up to defend Lipstadt and Penguin Publishers. English libel law is weighted in favour of the plaintiff – the onus is on the defendant to prove that they did not libel the plaintiff.

This trial, which began in 2000, raised questions about modern history. Is there such a thing as objective historical truth? Are not Holocaust deniers exercising their freedom of speech, no matter how repulsive their views? Such issues occupy the minds of Armenians in the diaspora, facing the organised campaign to deny and downplay the genocide of the Armenians by the Turkish Republic in 1915.

Rampton, who taught himself German for the trial, attacked the falsifications and distortions in Irving’s books. Demonstrating a clear pattern of behaviour in Irving’s work that tended towards exculpating the Nazi regime, Rampton conclusively proved that Irving was a Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust denier. Rampton did not allow Holocaust survivors to testify, lest they be subjected to taunts and ridicule from Irving (the latter had done that on numerous occasions).

The court ruled in favour of Lipstadt and Penguin Publishers. Rampton, the judge stated, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, racist and antisemite. The objective facts of the Holocaust could not be disputed. Rampton, throughout his legal career, won many libel cases, but his triumph over Irving was the victory for which he wished to be remembered.

The trial, and the issues involved, were dramatised in the 2016 movie Denial, with the English actor Tom Wilkinson (RIP) playing Rampton. One of the expert witnesses who testified in Lipstadt’s defence, Richard J Evans, wrote the definitive account of the entire topic.

When a prominent person like Rampton passes away, it makes me consider what subjects I would have liked to discuss with them if they were still alive. So many topics and questions arise in that scenario, but there is one topic I would have loved to talk about with Rampton. While Irving was the most prolific Holocaust denier and history revisionist, he was not the only one attempting to whitewash the criminal record of a genocidal regime from the World War 2 years.

Established institutions, sporting clubs and migrant centres among the Croat Australian community have for decades celebrated and whitewashed the genocidal record of the 1941-45 Croat Ustasha regime. Led by Nazi collaborator Ante Pavelic, the ideology of hyper nationalist racism underpinned that regime. The Ustasha massacred Jews, Serbs, anti-Ustasha Croats, Croats who had converted to Orthodox Christianity – all with the active connivance of the Catholic Church.

The Ustasha regime earned a reputation for gruesome violence, implementing its ultranationalist vision of an ethnically pure Croatia. Defeated by the multiethnic Yugoslav partisans, functionaries of the Ustasha escaped justice in Europe, many settling in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.

The Croats who came to Australia were virulently anti-Yugoslav, and had experience in committing acts of terrorist violence. The soccer clubs and migrant centres founded by Croat Australians promoted a narrow, ultranationalist version of their nation’s recent history. This is not my invention, but the findings of an investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Entitled “Fascists in our midst: the community whose leaders embrace Nazi links”, the SMH journalists found that Ustasha memorabilia is incorporated into the clubs and institutions of Croat Australian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. April 10, the anniversary of the establishment of the Ustasha regime, is openly celebrated. The sadistic pogroms committed by the foot soldiers of the ultranationalist Croat regime is either denied, or downplayed as ‘Yugoslav communist propaganda.’

Srecko Rover, a Croat ultranationalist who played a crucial role in founding migrant clubs and institutions for the Croat community, had a history he would have wanted others to forget. A member of the Ustasha, he was a participant in mobile killing units, targeting Serbs, Jews, non-Catholic Croats and other minorities in the areas controlled by the Pavelic regime. Rover found sanctuary in Australia.

Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the Croat ultranationalist community has only increased its efforts to revise the history of World War 2 era Nazi collaborator groups, such as the Ustasha. Reinventing war criminals as anticommunist ‘nationalist heroes’ was made easier by the warm reception granted to escaping Croat Ustasha killers in the immediate aftermath of the war.

In a similar manner to Canada, Australian multiculturalism has a dark underbelly – providing refuge to those Eastern European white supremacists fleeing international justice at Nuremberg. Holocaust obfuscation is a central tenet of destructive Eastern European ultranationalist revisions of modern history.

Indeed, in the former Yugoslavia, this kind of destructive revisionism is under way, with statues and memorials to the partisans vandalised, and their antifascist struggle downplayed.

I wonder what Rampton would have made of the sanctuary provided for fascist war criminals in Australia. I wonder what he would have observed about the falsification of history happening among sections of the multicultural Australia community.

My understanding of psychology comes from popular books, magazines, my time as an undergraduate decades ago, and internet columns. While I was good at psychology, I was not so outstanding that anybody made a fuss, if that makes sense. My late father encouraged me to study psychology. One aspect of the neuroscience module in the psychology course was the name Santiago Ramon y Cajal, a scientist who should rightfully be up there with Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, Pavlov, Einstein and Hawking.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 – 1934), co-winner of the 1906 Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine, is responsible for our current understanding of neurons, single discrete cells which, via axons and dendrites, communicate and make up the human nervous system. The discovery of the neuron as the fundamental unit of the nervous system was a crucial scientific breakthrough, because it laid the basis for the emerging field of neuroscience.

The birth of the neuron doctrine was not all smooth sailing. It had to confront, and eventually overthrow, the reticular theory of the nervous system. Today, we all understand the nervous system to be composed of neurons. The axons carry signals via neurotransmitters to the dendrites of the next neuron.

However, Cajal’s findings flew directly in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy of the time; reticular theory. The latter held that the nervous system was one, singular connected network. He fought tooth and nail to have his findings discussed and accepted. Using the metaphor of a tangled thicket, his illustrations of the intricate network of neurons are considered not just scientific breakthroughs, but also works of art in their own way.

He was not only interested in the physical structure of the brain and nervous system, but also in the workings of the mind. He was responding to the predominant theory of vitalism. The latter held that mental life was dominated by an immaterial force, a soul, which guided the psyche. Cajal, by demonstrating his discovery of the pyramidal cell – his initial name for the neuron – provided an anatomical basis for the activity of the brain. He was striving for a material explanation of the mind – consciousness.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal challenged Freudian analysis, by demonstrating that humans have a very physical – what we now call electrochemical – network of neurons and nerve connections. He opposed the inherent mysticism of orthodox Freudian doctrine – how can we comprehend the unconscious? Denouncing Freud’s analysis as pseudoscience, he maintained a strong rivalry with the Viennese author, which was Cajal’s reference to Freud.

Cajal was definitely not the first to wrestle with the thorny issue of consciousness – how can the human mind study itself? Indeed, the examination of consciousness goes back thousands of years. The Upanishads, the ancient Hindu texts, deal directly with the topic of consciousness. Does that make the Upanishads correct? No, but it does demonstrate how deeply ingrained the study of consciousness is.

Let’s not go down the path of surreptitiously introducing immaterial, metaphysical concepts into the study of mind – Deepak Chopra’s labyrinthine twists and turns of modern scientific findings into Hindu-adjacent concepts is a prime example of this institutional absurdity.

While I do not propose to solve the entire mystery of consciousness in one article, I would venture a suggestion. Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934), and his colleague Alexander Luria (1902 – 1977) recognised the importance of a physiological basis of brain activity, but also closely studied cultural socialisation and labour activity as crucial determinants in the emergence of consciousness. They avoided the twin pitfalls of biological reductionism, and the drift into metaphysical immaterialism. Labouring activity is indeed vital to the production and maintenance of human consciousness.

What makes us tick? How can we better understand human behaviour? It is not only psychologists who are asking this question, but giant tech companies as well. What am I talking about? Surveillance capitalism.

What is surveillance capitalism? Professor Shoshanna Zuboff wrote that our personal data, our shopping preferences, purchases, individual searches and choices, are now commodities for big data corporations. Why? To analyse our consumer behaviour, and predict our future habits. Driven by the profit motive, our private lives and personal information is a valuable commodity, to be bought and sold, and exploited. The large corporations want to modify our behaviour by understanding what is going on inside our heads.

The digital economy is a scenario of mass surveillance and data collection that Orwell could not possibly have imagined. The dystopian future of 1984 outlined a world where political surveillance was paramount. For instance, in communist Albania, prior to 1991, the state apparatus kept files on people’s political opinions. The ubiquitous secret police surveilled the population for political dissent.

In the post-1990 world with the rise of the neoliberal economy, the private sector amasses and exploits our personal data in a way unthinkable in Orwell’s time. Indeed, the post-Communist transformation in Albania turned out from a seemingly sweet transition into a sour and lethal social experiment.

The monetisation of our behavioural data and its conversion into profit has been done in the name of freedom. The tech giants have replaced the metaphorical Big Brother. Nearly every area of our lives – retail, finance, health care, travel – is in some way part of the surveillance capitalist paradigm. Back in 1986, former Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote about Psychological War in the west, and how our social consciousness is impacted by the propaganda efforts of the ruling class in the sociocultural sphere. It is an early book on the battle for our minds – perhaps he was not exaggerating.