Mattogno on Photographic Documentation

This article contains very graphic images that may disturb sensitive readers.

On page 402 of his recent Einsatzgruppen "masterpiece",^[1] Carlo Mattogno writes the following:

If these extraordinary Soviet discoveries, of which I have used those relating to the Ukraine as an example, were authentic, they should be confirmed by hundreds of photographs of mass graves and of exhumations taken by the various warcrimes commissions, and showing hundreds of thousands of bodies. However, photographs of this type are incredibly scarce. This is also true for the most prestigious among Holocaust archives, such as those at Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Ghetto Fighter House.

Over this and the following 7 pages (402 to 410), Mattogno then treats his readers to a litany of juxtapositions between the number of corpses (if any) that can be seen on published photographs of a number of killing sites and the number of people killed at these sites according to various sources – German documents (namely the Jäger Report^[2]), Soviet investigation reports or historical writing.

In this article I will test the aforementioned arguments for substance.

What "Revisionism" is all about – A Chat with Fredrick Töben (Part 2)

As announced in Part 1 of this article, I shall now comment on Artur Butz’s "brief 12-point summary" attached to Mr. Töben’s "brief response".

Comparing Genocides and other Category Killings

A question that recurs in genocide studies is whether or not the crimes of Stalin and Mao can be classed as genocides. In the strictest sense, it would be difficult to justify such a classification, because the millions of victims murdered by these regimes were chosen on political and economic grounds, not ethnic or racial in most cases. However, a continuity between these killings and genocide can be found in the theme of pollution. I have already applied this concept to the Nazis here and to the Khmer Rouge here.

As Eric Weitz has noted, the revolutionary, utopian nature of Stalinism and Maoism, and their ultimate origins in world wars, made them prone to seek cleansing missions. Whilst such cleansing did not seek partial or total biological extermination in the Nazi sense, it had the potential to be unlimited in its effects, as occurred ultimately with the Khmer Rouge. I would argue that exploring these connections may be more fruitful than confining the field to events that fit a definition of genocide.

The Khmer Rouge

Ben Kiernan, p.38, cites an announcement on Phnom Penh Radio dated May 10th, 1978, which stated that the Cambodian army would kill 30 Vietnamese for every Cambodian, and thus sacrifice "2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese," leaving 6 million Cambodian survivors. This revealed three essential features of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime, which can also be found in its genocidal domestic program.