A lie about the past is comforting, confirms feelings about which one would otherwise feel ashamed, and sets reassuring benchmarks, regardless of whether they are true or false.
Destroying a hoax of a historical nature, then, has two effects: the first is to correct the set of information about the past that is used to build one's own individual and collective memory; a use that we will call 'neutral', or at most, 'restorative'. The second effect, more difficult to achieve, is to destroy the certainties and presumed real data in the listener; a dangerous phenomenon, which can create a wall of incommunication. A certainty is not destroyed with impunity.
For this reason, the work of deconstructing historical falsehoods is often of little use in changing the attitude of the disseminators of this news. But it is a work that is carried out to circumscribe the scope of dissemination of fake news that poisons memory, and through it, the perception of the present. Debunking a lie that circulates on the Internet may not serve to change the mind of those who spread stupidity, but it does serve to those who surf the web, to be able to recognize and remove sources of fake news.
The basis of a possible totalitarian future also involves the rehabilitation of the totalitarian past. Showing the reality of that past is a first step to prevent that past from becoming the future.