Mattogno, Graf & Kues' book about Sobibór has been published

So Mattogno proudly announces in his latest blog on the "Inconvenient History" blog site. The book bears the instructive title «Sobibór: Holocaust Propaganda and Reality».



Mattogno emphasizes Chapter V - «Critical Analysis of Material Evidence» (which I expect to contain claims that have been debunked in the HC blogs about Carlo Mattogno on Belzec Archaeological Research and Mass Graves at Nazi Extermination Camps, among others, maybe with further attempts to address the refutations contained in these blogs), Chapter VIII - «The Führerbefehl and the Origins of the "Extermination Camps" in the East» (I'm curious to see what MGK have got there regarding policy issues such as were last addressed in response to their brother-in-faith "Thomas Dalton PhD" in the blogs Thomas Dalton responds to Roberto Muehlenkamp and Andrew Mathis (3) and Goebbels on 27 March 1942 – "Dalton" keeps on trying), and Chapter X, which is supposed to contain «the most comprehensive study yet on the fate of the Jewish prisoners deported to the East» (all that between pages 347 and 369 - let's see what the authors managed to pack into these 22 pages that has not yet been refuted in the blog Belzec Mass Graves and Archaeology: My Response to Carlo Mattogno (5,2) and in my recent deconstruction of Thomas Kues' laborius attempt to present «Evidence for the Presence of "Gassed" Jews in the Occupied Eastern Territories», among other articles on this blog site).

Mattogno's most amusing claims can be found at the beginning and the end of his blog, however. He starts out as follows:

It is an acknowledged fact that Holocaust historiography reached its peak in 2002 and has since begun a gradual and inexorable decline.

Apparently Mattogno counts as "Holocaust historiography" only the relatively few printed sources that have undertaken to address "Revisionist" claims. If so, he is repeating the claim of "Thomas Dalton PhD" that was commented as follows in the blog Old Herrings in a New Can: Thomas Dalton’s Debating the Holocaust (1):

Robert van Pelt (author of a "hefty 2002 book"), John Zimmerman ("the first to seriously address, in detail, the revisionist arguments" and "an accountant at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas"), Deborah Lipstadt ("very little" of whose book Denying the Holocaust "addresses the actual arguments"), Pierre Vidal-Naquet ("An arrogant and polemical response to revisionism") and Jean-Claude Pressac (whose "very detailed study" of the Auschwitz gas chambers "raised as many questions as it answered", and who "died in 2003, having fallen out of favor with the traditionalist establishment") are five of the "traditionalist writers" listed by Dalton as having "taken it upon themselves to directly challenge" the "Revisionist" view. The list reads like a litany of failures, the best credits going to the "accountant" Zimmerman (who is actually an associate professor at the University of Nevada). And what is worse, anti-revisionist forces have been "notably quiet since 2002", no "new anti-revisionist books" having appeared, "and only a handful of journal articles" (this "handful", incidentally, includes the report on The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau, by Daniel Keren, Jamie McCarthy, and Harry W. Mazal), in "marked contrast" with "the outpouring of books by revisionists in that same period—nearly a dozen in total".

I haven't heard of anti-"Revisionist" books since the works of Zimmerman and van Pelt indeed, and it's not surprising, given his apparent tendency for wishful thinking, that Dalton sees this as an indication that "traditionalists" are on the ropes (as he suggests in the Introduction, see above).

Outside the world of "Revisionist" wishful thinking, one possible reason for there having been no books specifically targeting "Revisionism" in the last years is that the potential authors of such books consider the job of debunking "Revisionism" to have been accomplished with the works of Zimmerman and van Pelt and the judgment at the Irving-Lipstadt trial, besides the many works of "traditionalist" historians whose supposed refusal to "take on the revisionist challenge" (solid research is one way of doing just that, whether or not it is meant for this purpose) Dalton eagerly chides as avoiding "a battle that you may well lose".

But the main reason, as I see it, is one that Dalton doesn’t mention, although a statement in his Introduction ("Much controversial material can be published only on the Web, and this point must be noted") suggests that he is well aware of it: the key medium through which "Revisionist" propaganda is disseminated is the Web (which is also why "several complete revisionist texts are available free online", as Dalton approvingly notes). It is therefore only logical that the Web, and not the book market, is the essential arena on which "Revisionism" is confronted, and that it is essentially on the Web that key anti-"Revisionist" material can be found.

Dalton lamely tries to avoid having to tackle Web opposition to "Revisionism" by giving a speech in the Introduction about the supposed general unreliability of Web sources (actually the Web's offer of information ranges from highly reliable to abysmally unreliable, just like the book market's) and playing down this blogspot and The Holocaust History Project as sites of "some minor Web-based activity" in footnote 16 to Chapter 1.

However, this "minor Web-based activity", as I already noted in my Amazon review of Dalton's book, seems to have worried him enough dedicate it some dishonest hand-waving remarks, of which Dalton’s publisher, Michael Santomauro, kindly provided an instructive example.

If, on the other hand, Mattogno should have been referring to Holocaust historiography in general, it will be interesting to see what of recent Holocaust historiography is (not) included in the bibliographies of recent works he has (co)authored, including but not limited to MGK's Sobibor book.

Also affected by wishful thinking (to put it politely) is Mattogno's subsequent claim that what he calls "Revisionist historiography" (I wouldn't call "Revisionist" propaganda historiography, and it certainly is not revisionism) «has flourished in the last decade».

Actually one wonders where "Revisionism" would be these days without it's lone researchers Mattogno, Graf & Kues, and without Mr. "Dalton" as the bard of its "achievements".

And even with these gentlemen things don't look good, for both the movement's bard and its coryphées keep showing that they are just ideologically motivated charlatans. As Sergey Romanov wrote about Mattogno and Graf in one of his blogs, if they are the best, what can one say about the rest?

At the end of the blog comes Mattogno's victory dance:

Holocaust historiography, gravely embarrassed as always, keeps silent. To compensate it flings accusations of "antisemitism" to the right and left. Being completely unable to counter anything it can react only with hysteric invectives or, possibly, a real debate.

The first sentence mirrors Mr. "Dalton"'s eagerness to believe (or have his readers believe) that historians are avoiding "a battle that you may well lose".

As to the second and third sentences, I don't know what representatives of "Holocaust historiography" exactly Mattogno had in mind, and I doubt that Mattogno can truthfully tell us.

But then, I understand that Mattogno needs to vent is frustration over the fact that historians mostly ignore his Herculean attempts to bend facts to faith (he boasts that «the revisionist bibliography on the alleged extermination camps of Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór and Chełmno has reached 1,218 pages»), while those exposing his faulty reasoning and falsehoods are mostly not historians but amateurs who do it for fun (besides aversion to propagandistic nonsense) in their free time.

In his post of Wednesday, October 18, 2006 3:15:00 PM after the blog That's why it is denial, not revisionism. Part VIII: The Simferopol Massacres, Sergey Romanov aptly characterized the problem of Mattogno and his fellow "Revisionist" scion(s):

I think Roberto's posting shows that M&G are really nothing but intellectual dwarves. "Even" amateurs like Roberto or me, relying on publicly available sources, can make a mincemeat out of them.

MGK's writings about Sobibór in an earlier pamphlet (partially commmented here) don't suggest that the team's third member has brought any improvement.