Ancient Code Writer Complains I'm Unfair. Plus: Scott Wolter Endorses Ex-Nazi's Hunt for Lost White Colonies

Last week I wrote about an article that appeared on Ancient Code describing Aztec giants. In that blog post, I noted that the author, Ivan Petricevic, was lightly rewriting content from earlier web articles by other authors, and that at least one sentence was reproduced verbatim from a book without quotation marks or acknowledgement of the source. Well, that made Petricevic mad, and he decided to contact me on Friday to express his displeasure, not at being wrong, or endorsing fiction as fact, but for having someone mention his missteps in public. 

“Cheap shot on that poor article,” Petricevic wrote to me via Facebook. “Should have contacted me if you had an issue with me, but that speaks a lot about you.” He added, “But oh boy, who do you think you are to attack me like that?”
 
Petricevic went on to defend his writing by saying that he had merely forgotten to use quotation marks and to cite his sources, but that such omissions should not count as plagiarism, despite being pretty much the definition of plagiarism. “I don’t copy anyone’s work. On some articles citation is missing but that is an entirely different thing.” Again, omitting the citation is pretty much exactly the definition of copying other people’s work.
 
Do all online authors subscribe to a newsletter that provides helpful templates for expressing outrage? I ask because Petricevic’s message to me via Facebook was nearly point-for-point identical to the odd complaints other third-tier fringe writers and some skeptics have made, specifically in the claim that I somehow have a moral obligation to contact the authors of publicly accessible published documents to share my concerns about those documents privately rather than discuss that material in a public forum.
 
“If you have an issue with Ancient Code which I created, with the advertisement on the website, or with my citations,” Petricevic said, “you could have contacted me as a professional writer and criticize me in an appropriate manner.”
 
I just don’t understand that. If an article is published for all the world to see, surely that means that it can and should be discussed publicly. I don’t see it as my job to make other people’s articles and websites better but rather to share my insights and views with my readers. I asked Petricevic if he contacts the subjects of his articles to express his concerns about their Illuminati, extraterrestrial, or New World Order connections before criticizing them online. I received no response, and that about says it all.
 
Petricevic did state that he has “begun” to address his citation and documentation problems in articles across his website.
 
Meanwhile, over on Scott Wolter’s blog, the quixotic geologist revealed that he still hasn’t learned anything about optics when he chose to once again endorse the work of racist Nazi (and later Neo-Nazi) “anthropologist” Jacques de Mahieu: “I am very aware of de Mahieu’s book and have corresponded with his son in South America. I think he has done good work that should be followed up on.” Now, granted, merely being a Nazi and a racist doesn’t automatically make one’s work suspect. Otto Rahn’s work on the Holy Grail is often cited as being of value despite his SS connections, for example. But de Mahieu’s claims were specifically about white racial supremacy, so his racist and Nazi affiliations ought to be pretty damn relevant and perhaps something to shy away from if one of the major criticisms of your own work is that it promotes a Eurocentric and colonialist narrative.
 
De Mahieu was a Nazi collaborator in Vichy France, serving in the Waffen-SS’s Charlemagne Division, and later served as a Peronist in Argentina (Juan Perόn had helped Nazis, including de Mahieu, escape Europe at the end of the war) and as head of one of Argentina’s Neo-Nazi parties. He wrote books on Esoteric Nazism, the spiritual aspect of Nazi occultism. He was an advocate of scientific racism and promoted the superiority of European (white) South Americans over those of mixed or indigenous descent. According to an article in Nouvelle École (no. 47, 1995), De Mahieu held degrees in philosophy, medicine, economics, and political science, but not history, archaeology, or anthropology.
 
Wolter endorses de Mahieu because of two of his Nazi-inspired white supremacist claims: that the Vikings reached South America in the Middle Ages and that the Knights Templar settled in pre-Columbian Mexico.
 
Wolter believes that de Mahieu’s Nazi-inspired hunt for white people in the pre-Columbian Americas was “good work.”
 
Seriously? Again?! When will fringe historians learn to leave the Nazis alone?

Oh, who are we kidding? The History Channel is launching a new show about conspiracy theories of Hitler surviving World War II.