Fragments: Another Ordinary Life

*** Getting this issue of Smith’s Report done has been difficult for me. There is nothing in the Report itself that is difficult. An accounting of what Jett Rucker and I did at Kent State and Boston Universities with regard to the Elie Wiesel question. And then the story about how Doug Christie approached me with his idea to go to important international figures to ask for their support in developing the right to a free press with regard to questioning the orthodox Holocaust story. But I found that organizing the material, as simple as it is, was difficult. It was as if, when I looked at the page, the brain turned blank. Or “white,” as Mexicans would have it. Inside the head, things were stalled. That went on for weeks. Literally.

Odd, but at the same time the unending interior monologue, or dialogue, never stopped and had the same “youthful” ring to it that it had 50 years ago and longer. It’s as if, inwardly, I’d never aged. When I was a kid—and the brain turns back to Korea and to Mexico in the 1950s—I did things without thinking that I would never do now. I’m more aware of consequences now than I was in those days. Caution. Caution itself might be one kind of maturity. A rather ordinary kind.

I was on the phone with Ted, telling him about this and I said: “Maybe it’s just that I’m getting old.” He replied: “You’re not getting old, Bradley. You ARE old!”

Okay. I suppose so. Eighty-three.

*** Noam Chomsky writes: “Rack up another triumph for President Obama's global assassination program, which creates hatred of the United States and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday.”

This is what Ron Paul has been saying for a decade now.

*** This morning I woke up early—at 7.30, that’s early for me these days and I felt good. The head was clear. I understood this was the day to talk to Widmann and Rucker about the work. I called them both, missed them both, but left messages to get back to me when they can. I want their reaction to where I am with the work. Something is missing. I’m not being told that by others, but that is what I sense myself. I need to take a new tack, go at the work from a new, innovative angle.

*** The U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, federally funded, has launched a campaign to raise $540 million by 2018 to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and to “combat anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and contemporary genocide.” It has already secured gifts totaling $258.7 million in its quest to double the size of the museum’s endowment by its 25th anniversary. Also, a $15 million gift from Holocaust survivors David and Fela Shapell will help build a new collections and conservation center. That is, they expect to raise some $100 million dollars-plus a year for the next five years. One can only imagine what they can buy with that.

With regard to my own budget, business and personal, I need some $4,000 a month. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don’t.

*** “Who Is David Stein? A Strange Hollywood Republican Outs Himself as Holocaust Denier David Cole.” That is the headline to a story by Sharon Waxman in The Wrap, a Hollywood blog. See http://tinyurl.com/boqpfk6

Her story is reprinted in various Hollywood blogs and websites. The Huffington Post reprints The Wrap story. Since then there is little newto report. It’s as if the major Hollywood figures associated with Stein-Cole’s “Republican Party Animals” are keeping quiet. Why would they not? We’re talking Hollywood here.

*** Widmann has gotten back with me. Widmann himself got involved with revisionism through an ad Smith placed in Widmann’s campus newspaper some 20 years ago. It was Widmann who later convinced me to create a Web page for CODOH on the Internet. It is Widmann who has gone on to publish Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry. This all began with one ad placed in one student newspaper.

We both recognize the fact that the other side has grown increasingly effective in the suppression of revisionist arguments in all mainline media on and off-campus. Nothing that I have done before can be done now with any real facility. The Holocaust Industry has become immense with some 150 Holocaust museums, memorials and centers in the United States alone, with a collective financial support that is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Okay. So what now? Well, Widmann has a suggestion. Twitter. For those of you who are not familiar with Twitter, it is an online social networking service, a kind of micro-blogging service that allows its user to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters. Those messages are known as “tweets.” I am reminded of the stories beginning in the 19^th century of the introduction of the telegraph and their brief messages printed out on a piece of yellow paper. Brief texts, but transformative in that era.

Twitter was created in 2006 and gained worldwide popularity so quickly that by 2012 there were some 500 million registered users. You do not have to be registered to read tweets, but registered users can post tweets using any number of mobile devices that are referred to now as “apps.” Widmann has grown increasingly aware that young people, his son among them, were using “smart phones,” rather than the standard cell phones like he and I both use. You can’t tweet using a standard cell phone, but with a “smart” phone and all their apps available you can do most anything you can imagine doing. Widmann has now bought a “smart” phone.

Widmann mentioned in passing that Michael Shermer has some 40,000 followers via Twitter. Of course, Shermer is a professional academic, publishes a real magazine The Skeptic (which is skeptical about most everything except the gas-chambers stories), and has been at it for some time now. But if I can pull off a successful Twitter gig, we could possibly reach thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of new people with revisionist information. Not just on campus, but everywhere. It would be a new step, maybe a Giant step (to coin a phrase) in taking holocaust revisionist arguments to the public. If Shermer can get 40,000 Twitter followers, I think Smith can do it, with Rucker continuing to pitch in.

In order to stand out amidst the immense number of Twitter accounts online, you are advised to develop a persona for people to connect to and identify with. You need to figure out what makes you unique in your niche and then extend these differences between you and others in your Twitter posts. Decide what your persona or approach is and then make sure your Twitter posts reflect that. Just my cup of tea, an old autobiographer. The uninhibited revelation of what goes on in the brain and the heart throughout the day as you react to Holocaust fraud and falsehood, and to ordinary life. And linking everything to documents in CODOH and work Smith has done.

*** On the telephone late last night with an old friend. We hadn’t talked in two, three years. He’s asking how I am, asking if I can still get around and so on. I give him the health history of the last couple years, including the business about the stroke, that it is sometimes difficult to follow a concept through from beginning to end.

At that moment the image of a wooden match appeared in the mind’s eye. What I saw was an ordinary wood match—but there was no head on it. No way for it to light. It was as if the brain had effortlessly acknowledged, with that one simple image, its present condition. Brilliant!

*** Explosion at 4.30 in morning. In the first instant I think “bomb” and my heart hesitates. In the next I am aware that the explosion has a “thudding” sound to it, not a “cracking” one, and I understand it is not a bomb. As it turned out, a major electrical transformer out on the street had exploded. By mid-afternoon it was fixed and the lights and the computer were working again.

*** We get an update from a correspondent in France regarding Ernst Zündel’s situation. His exclusion from the USA was halved by a Cincinnati judge and it expired Feb. 5 past. However he was prevented from entering the USA from Costa Rica. His American lawyers tried to use the same procedure they had used for Germar Rudolf but it didn't work. Zündel speculates that American bureaucrats consider him more dangerous. Moreover, there is a rule that imprisonment for five years permanently bars him from entering the country. There is an appellate procedure and if that fails there remain only appeal to the Dept. of State and the President. His three-year German parole period just ended.

At present he is waiting for Canada to submit documents relating to his case. He will eventually be interviewed by the US Consulate in Frankfurt. One of his lawyers will fly to Frankfurt for the hearing, which will be his first before an American panel. They will reject his application on account of the five-year rule. At that point his lawyers will appeal. God only knows how much time and money these efforts will require.

*** Slept good last night and this morning when I woke up there before me was an idea. Nothing grand, but interesting. As I begin to use Twitter this week—Twitter is referred to as a “SMS” or “short message system”—I can suggest that if the “follower” is interested is encouraging a free exchange of ideas re the Holocaust question that she can place a live link advertisement in any campus or off campus newspaper that is online. Her choice. The ad would read simply: “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust Question.” The ad itself would be the link, and it would take the reader to the CODOH home page.

And then it occurs to me that anyone of you can do the same. You don’t have to do it through me. Not bad. We’ll see.

Until next month then—thank you for your support.

Bradley