Friday, January 23, 2009

Rudolf and the Convergence of Evidence

I am grateful to Dave Woolfe for drawing my attention to this article, which suggests that Rudolf knows rather more than his denier disciples about the limited ability of physical science to prove or disprove historical cases. Dave's excellent commentary can be found here.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Further Dishonesty from Gerdes

Gerdes has become so low and desperate that he now plagiarizes his fellow deniers. His dishonesty is documented in this Memory Hole Thread.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Torture and Forgery: The Fallacy of Possible Proof

The Fallacy of Possible Proof was outlined by David Hackett Fischer in Historians' Fallacies, pp.53-55, and is cited by Van Pelt here. It can be summarized as an unsubstantiated claim that a possibility should also be considered a probability, or even a certainty:

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The fallacy of the possible proof consists in an attempt to demonstrate that a factual statement is true or false by establishing the possibility of its truth or falsity. "One of the greatest fallacies of evidence," a logician has observed, "is the disposition to dwell on the actual possibility of its being false; a possibility which must exist when it is not demonstrative. Counsel can bewilder juries in this way till they almost doubt their own senses." This tactic may indeed prove to be forensically effective in an Anglo-American court of law, but it never proves a point at issue. Valid empirical proof requires not merely the establishment of possibility, but of probability. Moreover, it demands a balanced estimate of probabilities pro and con. If historians, like lawyers, must respect the doctrine of reasonable doubt, they must equally be able to recognize an unreasonable doubt when they see one.
Deniers apply this fallacy most commonly to torture and forgery. Hargis has done the former most recently in this thread, in which he also reveals his hypocrisy concerning perpetrator witnesses [suddenly two perpetrator witnesses are enough to establish proof].

The rule here is simple. Unless the claimant can show that Hoess was probably being tortured, or acting under fear of torture, at the moment of his confessions, the claim has no merit. Deniers will get nowhere until they accept that they have a burden of proof to demonstrate probability. All else is just conjecture, not history.

Monday, January 19, 2009

The guru and the chimp …

… have something in common besides their "Revisionist" faith and their intellectual dishonesty: they have both spent much time lately on my humble person.

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The guru ("Revisionist" coryphée Carlo Mattogno), who has not been very active over the past years, recently published what he calls a paragraph-by-paragraph "examination" of my 2006 article Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research.

Dissecting something written in a language I don’t speak (though I can more or less understand it as I'm fluent in two other Latin languages) will take a little longer than if Mattogno had shown the courtesy (not so much towards me – after all I must have pissed him off quite a bit, judging by the hysterical tirades one comes across in his risposta – as towards the sheep in his flock who don’t read Italian) of writing in or obtaining a translation into English (which, incidentally, is not my mother language either), but I won’t leave Mattogno without a response for 2 ½ years. The lateness of his response aside, I thank Mattogno for the opportunity he gave me to expand this blog's offer of information about Belzec extermination camp and "Revisionist" fallacies, which I’ll be glad to take advantage of.

The chimp ("Revisionist" cretin Greg Gerdes, who seems to be identical with this illustrious "White" specimen), has opened another thread on the CODOH forum to peddle some more of his comparatively limited (but not essentially different) repertoire, which I have responded to (as it currently stands) in my VNN posts # 1833 and # 1836.

Gerdes' again mouthing off about me on a forum he knows I have been banned from is further evidence (if that were still necessary) of his utter lack of character. Nevertheless (or also because of this), I thank Gerdes for yet another valuable contribution to the demise of "Revisionism".

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Hypocrisy and Forensics (Part 1)

Whenever a case appears in which the victims were 'ethnic Germans', deniers drop their negationist stance and suddenly begin to use techniques of 'convergence of evidence' that they reject when applied to Holocaust mass graves. This can be illustrated with two recent examples.

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Firstly, this Cesspit thread discusses the excavation of a grave at Malbork containing 1,800 bodies. As I believe in the 'convergence of evidence' and 'inference to the best explanation', I am happy to concur that the best explanation of the current evidence is that some or all of these persons were murdered by Soviet or Polish Communist authorities in 1945. What is striking, however, is that many of the hyper-positivist proofs demanded by deniers are not present in reports of this event. According to this AHF thread, there are no reports of teeth or bullets having been excavated. Where are the Gerdian demands for "just one tooth...one spent bullet"? There are also no photographs of the complete mass grave. Even Cesspit regular Turpitz is aware of this discrepancy and has to concoct an absurd conspiracist hypothesis to account for it:
I wonder why they do not show us the 1800 skeletal remains? Is it because it will put the communist photo forgeries to shame?
The second example is this Lusitania thread. I have shown in this Memory Hole thread how Hargis would have dealt with the newspaper coverage of this investigation had the victims been Jews.

Part 2

Hypocrisy and Forensics (Part 2)

The hypocrisy of deniers noted in Part 1 can also be found in the work of their current guru, Germar Rudolf.

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In Chapter 8 of The Rudolf Report, he makes this claim:
One can after all understand that these Polish authors made their careers in Communist Poland, and, as Polish patriots, can under no circumstances permit the undermining of 'Auschwitz' as a moral justification for the Polish ethnic cleansing of the East Prussians, East Pomeranians, and Silesians after the end of World War Two, as a result of which some three million Germans lost their lives, as well as it being the greatest land robbery of modern history.
Rudolf gives no sources for this "three million" figure. One may therefore ask, why aren't Hargis and Gerdes demanding that he supply the physical proof? "Just one tooth...one spent bullet".

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Why Conspiracy Theories Are Self-Debunking

No conspiracy theory has ever been able to explain why the conspirators left behind the clues that the conspiracy theorist has detected. The conspirators supposedly had the power to manufacture whatever evidence they pleased - to a standard that fooled entire generations of historians, lawyers, journalists, and so on - and to make the perpetrators 'corroborate' this manufactured evidence, yet they made elementary errors in their narrative such as having a 'scientifically impossible' murder weapon and contradictory eyewitnesses. How can conspirators have the superhuman ability to control all variables in the production and dissemination of evidence - without that conspiracy ever suffering any leakages - yet be unable to prevent the narrative developing the holes that only the conspiracy theorist can see?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

CODOH Implodes

January seems to be the Month of the Long Knives in the Cesspit. The point is rapidly approaching where the only residents left at the asylum will be the psychopath Greg Gerdes, whose hobbies are not to be recommended to the young, and the resident moderator, Jonnie 'Hannover' Hargis. What has happened to turn up the heat in the Fuehrerbunker?

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The short answer is that Mark Weber has admitted defeat over at the IHR and this has led the senile Nazi Fritz Berg to demand a petition to get Weber ousted from his cushy chair. Hargis opposes the petition for the obvious reason that he does not want to expose his own position to the possibility of review. If deniers can start firing their own gurus, someone might write to Bradley Smith and point out that the library assistant who moderates the site has presided over a steady decline in the site's traffic and should therefore be replaced by someone with a triple-digit IQ who is less prone to hitting the delete button.

Since Weber posted his article, Berg and other Cesspit regulars have posted at least six threads attacking Weber. Most of these are saved at this Memory Hole thread. To date, Hargis has deleted two threads, locked two others and mutilated one of the others with mad deletions. Meanwhile the front page still has a Hargis thread called "What wise men say about free speech and opinion" - posted without irony.

At this rate of regression, Hargis is in danger of turning CODOH into a duet between himself and Gerdes, a man so dishonest that he pretends that "conclusive proof" in historiography must go beyond unreasonable doubt, not just reasonable doubt. As Fischer reminds us:
If historians, like lawyers, must respect the doctrine of reasonable doubt, they must equally be able to recognize an unreasonable doubt when they see one.
CODOH, which turns unreasonable doubt into a religious dogma, is collapsing inward upon its own fallacies and will eventually disappear. In the last 18 months, its traffic has declined as shown here. Even Bradley must be beginning to realise that it's time to pull the plug on this farce and evict Jonnie from his bunker.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Eichmann Testimonies (Part 1)

Christopher R. Browning published an excellent study of Eichmann's testimonies here. This has recently been subjected to denier attacks by Grubach here and Hargis here. In this series of blogs, I examine Browning's arguments and expose the dishonest nature of the attacks. I begin with the sources of the Eichmann testimonies.

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Firstly, Hargis can be dismissed straight away because he is clearly ignorant of the Sassen tapes and transcripts. He claims that:
The alleged Sassen recordings have never been released for scrutiny. Why not? Why should we believe edited and alleged excerpts that were printed in Life magazine but the alleged tapes never released. What are they hiding?
This is baloney. The Sassen tapes are held in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz and have been heard in full by at least one historian, Imtrud Wojak. The transcripts were owned by individuals with pro-Nazi and/or pro-Eichmann leanings: Sassen himself, Eichmann's widow and Aschenauer; the latter published a biased, edited version here. Once again, Hargis and sources (even secondary ones) are total strangers.

Grubach has a different problem. He wants to play the torture card:
Eichmann was in Israeli captivity and facing death by hanging, which in itself is a form of very stressful coercion. It is possible that Eichmann was, after his capture, coerced to give testimony that is congruent with this Holocaust ideology, or he gave false testimony that he thought would help him escape a death sentence. Of course, there is even the possibility that he was tortured, or mind-altering drugs were used to gain the testimony the Israelis wanted to hear.

Did Browning take this into consideration, and hesitate, when he used the Eichmann memoirs as evidence for his theories in The Origins of the Final Solution? Maybe not. The book was published by the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Israel. No further comment necessary.
This is, of course, the product of a paranoid epistemology; and it ignores the fact that all the episodes that Browning discusses were first revealed by Eichmann in the Sassen interviews, when he was a free man. Moreover, Grubach cannot explain why, given that Eichmann was attempting to escape the hangman's noose, he did not simply tell Sassen that the Jews had all been relocated in the USSR. Eichmann would have been ideally placed to have known where the Jews went, and had fifteen years of freedom to construct a defence to that effect, yet he was unable to come up with a better strategy than the defence of obedience to superior orders.

Grubach is therefore forced to attempt to discredit the Sassen tapes by creating false 'discrepancies' between the Sassen transcripts and the post-capture testimonies. For example, he makes this claim about the testimony concerning Chelmno:
While in Israeli captivity, Eichmann repeated the “gassing-on-buses” story during his pretrial interrogation, but once again he apparently altered his story. The alleged gassing did not take place at Lodz (Litzmannstadt) as stated in Life magazine, but rather at Chelmno concentration camp.
We know this is wishful thinking without even consulting Browning's original text, because, earlier in the essay, Grubach has written that:
But here is the real eye-opener! Eichmann insisted in his precapture testimonials that he witnessed homicidal mass gassings of thousands of Jews in “gas busses” near Lodz (Litzmannstadt) in the winter of 1941-42 (p.17). We quote the Eichmann “observations” from Life magazine of November 28, 1960: “Later in that same winter [1941] [General] Müller sent me to watch Jews being gassed in the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] area of central Poland
So, Grubach twists "near Lodz" and "in the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] area of central Poland" to mean the city of Lodz itself, when infact a simple deduction and a little geographical check would have told him that Chelmno and Lodz were both in the Warthegau and that Eichmann, having driven from Lodz to Chelmno, would clearly associate the two locations. One would need to be willfully obtuse not to see that, in Eichmann's memory, the death camp "near Lodz" was Chelmno.

Hargis and Grubach cannot therefore even be honest about sources. In the next blog, I show how Grubach misrepresents Browning's methodology regarding the value of the testimonies as evidence.

Part 2

Eichmann Testimonies (Part 2)

Having shown Hargis and Grubach's mendacity on sources, I examine their distortions of Browning's methodology.

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They hang their analysis purely on Browning's statement that:
Clearly, anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann’s testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this.
They fail, however, to discuss the context in which Browning makes this assertion. He is referring to Eichmann's reliability as to the chronology of the events he describes, not the plausibility of the events themselves. All his criticisms of Eichmann relate to his bending of timelines to lessen his personal involvement in the decision-making process, which is Browning's area of academic interest. Hargis and Grubach want us to believe that these are sufficient grounds for a 'falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus' dismissal of the claims made about the events themselves.

Their analysis can be dismissed because they totally ignore the core of Browning's argument, which is that the substance of Eichmann's account can be judged against four 'tests', which he defines as self-interest, vividness, possibility and probability. Browning's summary shows how systematically these can be applied to the episodes described by Eichmann:
First, Eichmann's participation in all of these episodes would have remained unknown if Eichmann had not confessed to them...Second, these admissions were contrary to self-interest. He had no motive to invent them, if infact they had not actually occurred. Third, his description of each of the events has a distinct sense of vividness and authenticity and is compatible with what we know from other sources, even if the context and dating that Eichmann provided were often false...In all cases, Eichmann systematically tried to minimize the significance of his role in line with his overall defence strategy, and these cases of false dating were a transparent part of this strategy.
Grubach ignores these historiographical tests because he is not interested in historiography. He brushes off the substance of Browning's argument by firstly dodging it and then by dismissing the 'convergence of evidence' method on grounds that again rest upon epistemological paranoia:
A thorough critique of this argument is beyond the scope of this short discussion. But let it suffice to say that even false testimony can be “corroborated” by other false testimony; a series of false and lying testimonies can “corroborate” and “vindicate” each other, for even historical lies can develop a certain consistency.
Grubach rejects Browning, therefore, not by evaluating the specific cases of convergence that Browning outlines, but on the basis that it is possible for two or more pieces of false evidence to create a faulty convergence.

Is this ludicrous and paranoid reasoning really the best that Grubach can do? It would appear so.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

The Convergence of Negation

As we enter a new calendar year, let us take stock of where we are in the history of denial. The movement itself has been running out of gas for some time. Anyone who visits the Cesspit can do some simple maths to see how its traffic has declined year-on-year, due partially to its openly antisemitic premises and self-contradictory censorship practices (no-one but a cretin is going to stay with a 'free speech' forum that crudely censors all deviation from a totally negationist editorial line). The IHR is non-functioning. Most damagingly of all, the Internet has exposed the techniques of denial, and the movement cannot do anything other than wilt and wither when exposed to the heat of reason.

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The methodology of denial has not changed since the days of Rassinier, whose approach is summarized here by Elizabeth Strakosch:
Instead of basing his history on the convergence of evidence (overwhelming oral testimony, documents, etc), he based it on a convergence of doubt. Unable to cast doubt on the undeniable fact of the camps, he made isolated attacks on various aspects of the seemingly unified narrative of the Holocaust. He concluded that these various errors were linked together by a political conspiracy of the victors, rather than by the fact of the Holocaust. Thus he established the basic pattern of denial - dividing the event into its component parts and attacking smaller targets, thereby casting doubt on the whole without confronting it.
As we have noted before on this site, deniers use the cloak of 'doubt' to create negations: doubt is used, not to revise knowledge, but to nullify it. Strakosch thus shares our insight that the main debating strategy of denial is the argument from ignorance. This can be defined as the claim that:
'a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false, or that it is false because it has not been proved true' (Copi and Cohen, Introduction to Logic, 9th ed., 1994, p.116)
Strakosch cites a passage where Butz uses this fallacy:
If it [the Holocaust] did take place, it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organised and the
lines of authority in the killing, what the technical means were and that
those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (eg crematoria), who were the technicians involved, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the timetables of their executions…no historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project (Butz 1975: 8).
This is what I mean by my title for this blog, 'The Convergence of Negation'. It is the logical next step implied by Strakosch's phrase, 'the convergence of doubt'. A supposed faulty brick is treated by deniers as proof that the wall itself is a hoax. The supposed inability of any single historian to fill in every gap in a narrative that has millions of components is seen as proof of a deception, without any attempt being made to construct a plausible narrative of how the hoax occurred, or to offer an alternative account of the fate of the Jews that coheres with the evidence. A single historian - or, even more absurdly, the writer of a single post on an Internet forum - is assumed to be 'debunked' if he or she has not summarized in a few pages or paragraphs the thousands of pieces of evidence, often only existing in foreign languages, which prove that every single event included in the term 'Holocaust' occurred.

Beneath this negationist methodology, there is a paranoid epistemology. Instead of 'revising' the narrative that they find so objectionable, with new evidence and interpretations, deniers demand that legitimate historians prove that there was no hoax. How exactly does one falsify paranoia? We can show that lesser conspiracies than a 'Holohoax' have always been exposed in the past; that it would be impossible to silence thousands of witnesses to a Jewish resettlement in the East; that a vast number of false confessions by SS officials cannot go unexposed indefinitely without someone retracting or resiling; that no bureaucracy has yet been devised that could construct a body of thousands of pieces of evidence that converge across continents and decades; that no resettled population entirely disappears in modern times without leaving a trace of how it disappeared.

We can show all these things but no paranoid epistemology will ever 'see' them. Paranoia, by its nature, is defined by the exaggerated powers that the paranoiac gives to the forces of darkness. It is a form of chimeria. We can see this in the current Cesspit obsession with the OSS, which apparently gave inordinate powers to Marxist sociologists and Irish-American film directors, no less!

The Cesspit's failure to recognize that it carries any burden of proof to substantiate any of this paranoid shit-slinging with evidence is itself an hilarious spectacle, and gives us a reason to smile as we enter another year fighting against lunacy and lies.