The Steaming Pile of MGK Manure is Here

Many of our readers will be aware that, nearly two years ago, the members of this blog produced a substantial “white paper” critique of three antisemitic Holocaust deniers named Carlo Mattogno, Jürgen Graf, and Thomas Kues (hereafter MGK) concerning the subject of the Aktion Reinhard camps. Our critique focused on three of their collective books: Mattogno and Graf’s Treblinka (2004), Mattogno’s Belzec (2004), and MGK’s Sobibor (2010). This weekend MGK posted this response consisting of ludicrously bloviated diatribes and arguments based on logical fallacies such as Argumentum Verbosium, which is a common feature of conspiracist cranks like MGK. We are currently reading through the PDF file like men forced to walk through an endless river of manure. It will take us a long time to digest the whole pile of rotting vegetables, but here is a taster of its antisemitic contents. Mattogno writes:

An Italian writer troubled himself to count the number of persons exterminated according to the Bible by virtue of the “cherem”: 2,120,182. The biblical Jehudim were therefore real forerunners of the Einsatzgruppen, actually even worse, because besides men, women and children, they even exterminated the animals! Is pointing this out “anti-Semitic” too?

This is the level and tone to which Mattogno has sunk, abetted by his pet monkeys Graf and Kues. We will reserve our full response to the maniacal work until we have had time to read through the verbiage and recover from both our laughter at its fallacies and our migraines from its tedious length. However, a few preliminary remarks are necessary here in order to forewarn our readers of the crap they will encounter when reading MGK's work.

First of all, it must be said that this response has arrived more quickly than we originally anticipated. In past writings Mattogno generally took much longer to become aware of material, and in many cases he produced a response more than ten years too late, to the sound of deafening indifference. Three examples might suffice to get the point across: first, it apparently took Mattogno some twelve years to notice and comment on a 1997 article by Karin Orth concerning the testimony of Rudolf Hoess; second, Mattogno did not write in detail about Raul Hilberg’s classic work on the Holocaust (originally published in 1961, expanded in 1985, and translated into Italian in 1995) until 2008 (nor did Graf until 1999); and finally, he did not bother addressing a 1997 article by Christian Gerlach until a decade and a half later. Getting out a response within the same decade might seem to be a bit of an achievement, then.

Turning to what we can see of their response, we were astounded to discover that MGK have managed to write 1554 pages in response to us. Our initial “white paper” filled 570 pages, but yet discussed three of their books (942 pages all combined). Somehow, they have managed to produce a response which is more than double the length of our critique in word-count and nearly triple in page-count. This is an absurd feat that does not meet any academic standard whatsoever. If one sent a 1500+ page response to any semi-respectable publisher, they could only expect to be quickly rejected and told to make the content more concise; that is, unless one is laughed at hysterically by copy editors, proofreaders, and the like who would have to actually go through such verbiage to find the arguments and ultimate point to such a monstrosity.

Such an excessively verbose response seems to meet the criteria for the logical fallacy known as Argumentum Verbosium, which is a common feature of conspiracist cranks like Mattogno. While Graf airs out his delusions of grandeur as to why more reputable academics do not pay attention to MGK’s work, this is actually one of the core reasons: the format of their arguments is simply too long-winded that it is borderline unreadable even for the most ardent of audience members. MGK apparently do not concern themselves with the most effective and coherent way to communicate and present their ideas. For instance, the trio’s table of contents shows that MGK do not collaborate to write a single coherent argument on a topic, but instead have each author provide their own individual response and keep them separated for publication (e.g. Mattogno adds his own remarks to Chapter 7, Chapter 8, and Chapter 10, with his remarks deserving their own subsection).

In truth, Mattogno does seem to be the guiltiest of the trio in terms of verbiage. If his recent two-volume publication on Auschwitz were not a sufficient example, one could look at Chapter 6 of MGK’s reply (215 pages), which responds to Chapter 3 in our White Paper (93 pages); in other words, more than twice as long. This observation is hardly a contrived attack, and is a characteristic that has been noted by Mattogno’s fellow deniers as well. Arthur Butz, for instance, in a review of Mattogno’s puerile Auschwitz: The Case for Sanity, openly admitted: 

I do have a problem with Mattogno’s writings and, partly because I have already read many of them, and partly for reasons I shall presently elucidate, I did not read these recent two volumes in their entirety. A major reason I did not read all of Mattogno’s books is simply that I have great trouble following his arguments and, even after taking all that time and trouble, I can feel I have been left in the lurch. 

Roberto Faurisson came to a similar conclusion many years ago, when he noted Mattogno’s propensity for overly extensive block-quotes, his need for “greater conciseness and simplicity” or what Faurisson calls “the scholar’s or professional’s simplicity of expression,” and for his ability to discuss a matter without arriving at a clear conclusion or argument (“just when it seems that he is about to provide the key to the mystery…the reader is left unsatisfied”). Imagine how Faurisson would feel if he had to plough through 1554 pages of vomit only to find that "the key to the mystery" was still not buried within it.

While we have highlighted such wordiness and verbiage on the part of MGK (see pp. 9-10 in the critique), we have sought to remain as concise as we could ourselves. Admittedly we have not always been entirely successful with our brevity, particularly when we have slipped into point-by-point refutations. However, in the critique we primarily sought to identify and establish patterns of abuse by MGK; these patterns included a colossal omission of evidence, misrepresentation and minimization of what evidence they did use, an astounding ignorance of relevant literature, incomprehension or ignorance of context, as well as no clear methodological basis for their work (particularly in their treatment of witness statements).

Mattogno's verbiage also contains an endlessly repeated libel that we are somehow guilty of bibliographic plagiarism. He insists on labeling our citation of any document he finds mentioned in another historian's work as 'plagiarism'. These allegations are entirely false, and actually end up backfiring on Mattogno in several ways.

First, he is prone to alleging plagiarism from secondary sources but then fails to notice, or properly account for the fact that we actually cited the documents from an entirely different archive to the one cited in the secondary source. Examples: on p.423 of the response, Mattogno claims we took a source from Martin Dean, but Dean's work cites a Bundesarchiv reference whereas we cited US National Archives (NARA) references; on p.184 he claims we took a reference from Gerlach but he cited a Bundesarchiv microfilm whereas we cited a NARA microfilm; there is no concordance list, and Nick Terry had cited that document in his PhD some years ago, having copied it at NARA in 2002. 

Second, Mattogno is not very attentive to what we actually cited on a number of occasions. He alleges for example that Terry stole references from an article by Jan-Erik Schulte, but fails to notice that Schulte's references to a series of documents in a file from the Bundesarchiv Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten lack titles, whereas Terry's references to the same documents from the same file give the title of the document.

Third, it never seems to have occurred to Mattogno that we might have looked up specific files precisely because they contained documents which are discussed in the literature at large. In one case (p.788), he alleges that we plagiarised a document from Wendy Lower which Terry actually copied while Wendy Lower was present in the same reading room; Lower and Terry discussed it in person before her 2005 book came out. Mattogno bizarrely thinks that we sourced it by getting hold of an advance copy of a recent edited collection which was published after our white paper came out.

Fourth, Mattogno thinks that it is plagiarism if we cited a book/article title once, without a page number, which would turn a considerable volume of academic footnotes into 'plagiarism' if anyone other than him held to this cuckoo principle. The point of citing books and articles without further comment was invariably to demonstrate the volume of literature available on a topic, and if the best he can come up with is to handwave and claim we didn't read the work, then this only confirms how shallow his knowledge of the literature actually is.

In several cases these claims are actually quite amusing to us personally. In one example he claims that Terry never read an article that he has set three years in a row for a seminar reading on one of the undergraduate courses he teaches; in another case Mattogno says Terry did not read an article which appeared in the very same volume as one of his own published articles! If anyone hasn't read the thing, then it would appear to be Mattogno, as if he had actually found the volume of the yearbook in question, he would have very rapidly realised that Terry was in it.

The final example of Mattogno shooting himself in the foot with the incessant false allegations of not having gone to archives is that MGK cite extremely few archival sources themselves. In Book 1, which runs to p.794 and has 1807 footnotes, the three revisionist authors cite from not much more than 70 archival documents by our preliminary count, discounting Nuremberg and Eichmann trial documents that are often available in publications or online. Of these references, about 31 have previously appeared in MGK work, meaning that 22 months of effort led to just 40 new archival sources being cited, many of which were previously known to MGK via publications.

The situation is actually not much better regarding MGK's engagement with published work. Ignoring the 'revisionist' citations and self-citations for the worthless trash that they are, and after eliminating double-counts in their bibliography, MGK together cited just 451 books and articles over the length of their 1554 page response, with the overwhelming majority of titles having been cited by them in previous work. While our critique evidently stung them into looking up some work they had hitherto ignored, the gaps in their knowledge of the subjects they purport to master remain colossal.

One example will suffice for the time being: despite the crucial importance of the Soviet Union to their fantasy 'resettlement' thesis, Kues cites from just one scholarly work on Stalinism in his Chapter 7.6, preferring to rely instead on wild speculations and newspaper clippings that actually contradict his own arguments. Such a shoddy level of research might seem like an extreme case, but it is reproduced over and over in the response. MGK still evidently don't understand that their arguments constantly blunder into entire sub-fields, such as the history of Nazi war crimes trials, or occupation policy in the Soviet Union. Mastering those fields requires that relevant scholarship is digested and thoroughly understood, not misrepresented and quote-mined.

Mattogno's libels are rendered even more laughable by the fact that MGK have no historical methodology at all. They never consistently apply a consistent set of rules to any type of evidence, but instead operate a double standard. This is evidenced by Graf;s statement in his introductory chapter concerning the testimony of Kurt Gerstein. Graf suggests that Gerstein’s report is “totally unreliabile,” which does not bode well for Mattogno’s earlier usage of Gerstein as an indication of a disinfestation facility at the Belzec camp (see page 369 of the White Paper). In the meantime, we ask ourselves: when are MGK going to present a coherent account that links together the documents they spend hundred of pages seeking to obfuscate and minimize here? When will they explain how it is justifiable to cherrypick sources compiled by the same authorities whom they accuse of framing the Nazis?

Graf mixes his antisemitism into a form of personal abuse towards us which reaches a level that he would see as discrediting if we did it to him. His Introduction and Epilogue alone contain the phrases "sent by Yahweh himself", "Yahweh cheated us by sending out five clowns", "Jews definitely do not appreciate this type of humor", "Jewish ideologues of the Holocaust industry", "the Nessus shirt of international Jewry is Holocaust lie","Jews and their stooges","from the Jewish point of view", "Yahweh's greenhorn" and "Yahweh's moron." How bizarre that Graf should cite George Orwell as  Terry's "great compatriot" when Orwell's fought against fascists of Graf's ilk in the Spanish Civil War, and sought to participate in the British military against the Nazis. Orwell even wrote an essay on antisemitism in 1945 excoriating the petty, Jew-hating mentality that MGK possess.

When all the above points are considered, MGK should be grateful that we are wading through these 1554 pages of manure at all. The chumps that follow them at CODOH will doubtless only glance at selectively spammed passages. Simultaneously, these chumps and their pathetic leader Jonnie Hargis will claim this tome as evidence that "the tide is turning": a doubly ironic joke given that it appears at the same time as Iran's foreign policy is moving away from Holocaust denial. In other words, these three Nazi defenders are resurfacing at just the time when they schtick is being trashed even by their erstwhile allies. Mattogno had lost Faurisson and Butz; now he can wave goodbye to the endorsement of the only state that allowed these loons to use its political space as a forum for legitimacy.

Why are MGK so lost, even in their own antisemitic milieu? The answer is surely contained in the fact that their 1554 pages offer no positive narrative for chumps or fellow travelers. There is no evidence of resettlement, as we will show in a forthcoming piece when we again deconstruct Kues' kindergarten. There is no show here, chumps. Time to move on.