SMITH'S REPORT
 
 
 
 
 
America's Only Monthly
Revisionist Newsletter
 
 
 

 
- Number 28 -
November 1995

Contents

• New CODOH Ad appearing in Student Newspapers
• Revisionist Videotape Captures Attention of Foreign Leaders
• Letters
• and more!

and now... our lead story!

NEW CODOH AD APPEARING IN STUDENT NEWSPAPERS

    This is the one! A concept that would have been impossible for me to develop even a few months ago. An advertisement appearing in college newspapers that is tied directly to the Campus Internet Project on the World Wide Web. An ad that is small, inexpensive, difficult to refuse, and offers a generous slice of important information to students, faculty and everyone else --free!

    You may think the way this idea came to me is a little odd, but it's my experience this sort of thing is more commonplace than many think. One afternoon after I got my mother out of bed, dressed her and combed her hair and wheeled her out to the living room so we could give her dinner while she watched Peter Jennings, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, I left her in care of my wife, folded up a recent edition of the London Review, put it in my back pocket, got on Magaly's boyfriend's bicycle and peddled downtown to the Main Street Dinner and Bar to bend my elbow with a couple friends.

    The entire 40-foot front of the Main Street Diner is glassed and the bar faces the window so you can talk with your friends and watch the cars and pedestrians pass back and forth, which on late October afternoons with the sun setting over the roofs of the storefronts can be almost lovely. So I parked the bike and walked inside, put the London Review on the bar, ordered a Harp and was standing there contentedly -- well, torpidly I suppose (I think it helps in these particular moments to be a little torpid) -- looking at the red sunset and the orange and pink and pale blue sky that overhead had the first shadow of night in it when the idea came to me. It didn't come to me exactly, but to my ear. It was as if God had paused from His labor of setting the sun to pass through the Main Street Diner and Bar and blow a little poof of air in my right ear.

    Poof --and there it was, the concept for the Campus Project on the World Wide Web full blown, with all the implications of it fully understood, and even a picture of the new CODOH ad there before me. It was like a miracle. How the devil do those things happen? I don't think they are all that rare. I got excited and wanted to tell my friend Rich but he'd been drinking beer for a couple hours and he was talking to some other guys and when I tried to interrupt and he understood I wanted to talk about the holocaust he turned away. I suppose he thought there was no point in ruining a perfectly fine afternoon.

    I was too agitated now to read the London Review. I would place a one-inch, one-column classified advertisement in student newspapers at universities all over the country offering David Cole's 46 unanswered questions about the Nazi gas chambers, free, on the World Wide Web. I would give the address of the CODOH Website. Any computer-literate student on any campus in America will be able to download the 46 Questions. If a student doesn't have a computer he can ask one of his friends who does to do it for him. If he doesn't have a friend with a computer he can go to the campus library or other campus sites where computers are made available to computerless students who can download whatever they want.

    More than that, any member of any college faculty or administration, in the privacy of his or her own office, without anyone knowing, can download the 46 Questions without feeling shame or fear. Who will doubt that some of them will or that many of them might? We're talking about maybe tens of thousands of faculty and administrators on top of hundreds of thousands of students. The ads will be very small but very inexpensive, will run only once a week, and the word-of-mouth will be strong, tremendous even.

    Until that afternoon I had had an image of the CODOH Website as a space station out in the cosmos someplace, hardly connected to the planet. Here was its first connection. One "cable" tying the station down to earth. Not to someplace out in the Arizona wastelands, but to the hearts and minds of the university population around the country. Running the ad in even one college newspaper will start the ball rolling. This time it won't be a matter of spending $800, $1,000, even $1,700 (as I paid to run an ad at the University of Georgia a couple years ago) to run a 4,000-word text for one day. The ad will cost maybe $10 per insertion, will be inserted once a week for four to six weeks, after which, having "seeded" the address of the Website on that campus, I will be able to move on to another. From tiny seeds great acorns do grow, to coin a phrase.

    But that wasn't all. When the student or whomever mashes the right keys on his computer and arrives at the CODOH Website to read the 46 Questions, he will find all the other materials that will be on the site. Not to mention an advertisement offering for sale David Cole's videotape on Auschwitz, "David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper." Gradually I'll add the other videos and audiotapes I've accumulated over the years. So there is a possibility that the CODOH Website will produce some income from sales, though I'm not counting on that at the beginning. Selling on the Web is a very different thing that offering free information on the Web. But I do believe we can develop new supporters for the Campus Internet Project. Supporters are everything in this kind of project. New supporters mean new energy, new contributions, new ideas -- new everything.

    That evening when I returned home I wrote the ad. It was the easiest ad writing I had ever done. There's not much to it.

    To start with I would run the ad in Washington D.C., home of the Great (gas-chamber-less) Holocaust Museum. I would submit it to Georgetown University, University of Maryland (in College Park, a .D.C. suburb), and Howard University. I'd do it quickly then settle back and let some of the dust settle. I had a lot on my plate. I was just beginning to get the Website set up, I was trying to develop the offer on the David McCalden papers (which I suppose you have received by now), and I had a lot on my mind with regard to the money issue. I suppose I should mention sometime, so why not now, that last summer my wife was diagnosed as having cancer and we've been through two surgeries and she's on chemotherapy now and will do radiation after and then some more chemo and while she is doing well, even exceptionally well, it takes a certain amount of time out of our daily schedule and sometimes it can be rather distracting as well.

    In any event, the day I began faxing student newspapers for up-to-date advertising rates was the day of the Million Man March led by the man with the million dollar smile, the Reverend Louis Farrakhan. No one responded. I imagined everyone on campus with their eyes cemented to the TV screen. I got caught up in it myself and spent a good part of the afternoon (in California) watching the affair. I was bored by most everyone who spoke, particularly Jesse Jackson who was all politics and complaint and accusation as usual, but I was fascinated by Farrakhan who intermittently preached a fine sermon on atonement and forgiveness, straight out of the Black Baptist tradition, with a not unpleasant veneer of Muslim reference. I thought he chanted wonderfully. His amateurish and un-worked-out musings on the influence of Masonry on the American racial stand-off undercut the effect of his preaching and put him back down in the Jackson league, though I don't believe even Jackson has gone on about the Masons. I still haven't heard from Howard University, the campus where a couple weeks earlier students had expressed such joy over the acquittal of Mr. Simpson. I think the last few weeks may have been too exciting for them to pay attention to business.

    The first ads I submitted were to U. Maryland, Georgetown U. and Georgia State U. A supporter, hearing of the opening of this new phase of the Campus Project, offered to fund ads for U. Illinois at Chicago, U. Chicago, and Berkeley. U. Illinois at Chicago rejected the ad with an unsigned note. It has begun to appear in The Diamondback at U. of Maryland. I've received a tear sheet from the paper and the ad looks good, and I've gotten my first hate mail of the season. So here we go. . . .