Memo for the controversial bloggers, part VI: Conclusions

As I stated above, the bloggers’ manifesto is undoubtedly the most substantial piece of anti-revisionism since van Pelt’s Case for Auschwitz. Despite the work’s immense flaws, the exercise of engaging with its arguments and sources has proved salutary for revisionism. Yet, like van Pelt’s work, it is ultimately indefensible, written for tendentious purposes, lawyerly, systematically unfair to its opponents, and full of superficiality and error. Van Pelt has proven unable to defend his work against the withering critique which it has received from revisionists, most notably in Carlo Mattogno’s Auschwitz: the Case for Sanity, and his more recent work has declined severely in quality. Believing as I do that healthy criticism is good for a movement or school of thought, I hope that the bloggers will be able to avoid a similar decline, although I am forced to admit that the indications do not look good. One may hope that engaging with the criticisms voiced in this paper, and above all with the utter impossibility of their imagined cremation scenario, will help them to stave off such enfeeblement.

Although they have announced that they will not be offering a direct response to Mattogno, Graf, and Kues, I hope that the bloggers manage to find the courage to acknowledge the very serious corrections found in this memo. Naturally, just as they requested – and received – explicit acknowledgement of errors from Mattogno, Graf, and Kues (p. 527), I expect that the bloggers will not only correct the errors which I have pointed out, but also explicitly and transparently acknowledge these mistakes in their future work. Should the bloggers manage to work up the courage to reply, their response cannot be taken seriously unless they acknowledge the total failure of Roberto Muehlenkamp’s attempted apologia and come up with something more connected to reality. A response featuring Muehlenkamp’s predictable attempts to obfuscate his errors and defend the indefensible, above all on the matter of cremation, may have some humor value but will be, in scholarly terms, an automatic failure.