The CODOH Library, Castle Hill Publishers, Inconvenient History, the CODOH Forum, Facebook, and Amazon Kindle
How is it with CODOH as 2013 kicks off.? Remarkably well. The CODOH Library has grown to some 2,300 revisionist documents now, all searchable with a modern database. Santiago Alvarez, with a very small crew of volunteers, is driving that work. There’s nothing to compare with it anywhere. Castle Hill Publishers, the British revisionist book seller, is merging with CODOH.
Richard Widmann is on schedule with his online publication Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry. Volume 4 will be up for printing on schedule. The CODOH Forum remains the primary revisionist discussion site on the Internet—that is, in the world.
We are preparing to take revisionist papers to university Facebook pages. This has never been tried anywhere by any of us. And now we are going to place Smith’s Confessions of a Holocausts Revisionist onto the Amazon Kindle program.
The following brief notices are excerpted from CODOH-Web’s “Recent News” news posted on our homepage over the last 90 days. It is lightly edited for publication here. Most of the original posts are quite brief. The first, by Germar Rudolf, is an exception.
THE CODOH LIBRARY
11 November 2012
A Quarter Century Ago: The Leuchter Report
By Germar Rudolf
In February 1988, Fred Leuchter Jr., in the 1980s America’s only expert on execution technologies, was asked by the defense team of German-Canadian Ernst Zündel to go to the infamous Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps in Poland to verify whether or not the facilities actually used poison gas to kill inmates by the thousands—if not millions. He agreed to do this and write an expert report about his findings to be used in a Canadian court of law where at that time Zündel was being tried for “Holocaust denial.”
Before Fred Leuchter went to Poland, he was a firm believer in all he had been taught in school and through books and the mass media about the Holocaust. But when he looked into the evidence, he changed his mind. A few months later he described his conversion succinctly as follows:
“1988 was a very informative and likewise disturbing year. I was appalled to learn that much of what I was taught in school about twentieth-century history and World War II was a myth, if not a lie. I was first amazed; then annoyed; then aware: the myth of the Holocaust was dead.”
There was no End to the Myth. Such declarations of victory over the Myth were frequent in those days immediately after the release of the Leuchter Report. Unfortunately, twenty-five years later the Holocaust Myth is still very much alive. As a matter of fact, it can be argued that the Myth has gained in momentum and persuasive power—but not because the evidence presented for it has become more convincing. It is the increased propaganda output on all levels—media, schools, politics, academia—combined with an ever-increasing societal persecution and illegitimate, though “legal” prosecution of all dissidents, which has stifled many revisionist efforts to undermine and destroy this myth.
There are many reasons why Leuchter’s work or any of the others that followed it—my own expert report included, which followed in his footsteps—did not cause the myth to collapse. The most important reason is that the powers that be in government, media and the university have constructed a major part of their influence by setting standards for Good and Evil, standards where “Auschwitz”—or rather the events this moniker stands for—denote absolute evil. Challenging this upsets the way our post-WWII world is rigged, so it won’t happen without a fight. Hence revisionists have been and are being fought fiercely by these powers and their lackeys.
But there is another reason why Leuchter and his primary consultant, Prof. Robert Faurisson, did not ring in the end of the current world order, and this lies in the fact that the Leuchter Report wasn’t bullet-proof. Indeed, it had many flaws and the opponents of revisionism had a heyday in taking it apart and gloating over its discrepancies and deficiencies.
In all fairness, this had to be expected. After all, Leuchter had no in-depth knowledge of what he was investigating, and he had only a few weeks to get at least a superficial idea about the issues involved. But he did get one thing right: If we want to understand what was going on at Auschwitz, Majdanek and many other locations of the claimed judeocide, we need to apply standard forensic methods as they are used in any murder investigation, and Leuchter was the first to do exactly this. By so doing, he put his fingers into a festering wound of orthodox historiography which up to that time had been content to uncritically regurgitate anecdotal evidence of individuals who claim that they had been there and had seen it all.
Fred Leuchter
Leuchter’s work may have been wanting, but its flaws invited its opponents to deal with it. They made the Leuchter Report a part of their news—bad news, admittedly, but as we all understand, all news about revisionism is good news for revisionism—so revisionists got a lot of attention and for a short while they could not be ignored. As a result, many people who had ignored the revisionist challenge now started listening. Walter Lüftl, who in those early post-Leuchter years was the President of the Austrian Chamber of Engineers, was one of them. He said to me once that, if you want to stir a public debate on a topic that those in power want to hush up, you have to include a few mistakes in your work so that your enemies will pick it up, drag it into the public arena, and gloat over the mistakes.
That’s what they did with Leuchter’s work, and that was their mistake. The idea that the Holocaust had yet to be the subject of real, forensic, critical scrutiny caught on in many circles around the world. Ever since, a growing number of people have chipped in to widen the scope and scale of such research, to deepen its reach, and to improve and solidify the results.
So the story is far from over. Leuchter started it, and despite all the persecution that resulted for him and for those who preceded or followed him, they all keep on fighting. As Fred Leuchter stated five years ago:
“The harder the fight, the tougher we get.”
The Critical Edition
In the summer of 1989 I managed to get a copy of David Irving’s edition of the Leuchter Report. Back in those years my command of the English language was not good, so I had to sit down and translate it with a dictionary in my hand in order to understand what it said. The result both amazed and unsettled me in more than one way. I went through an experience similar to what Leuchter has summarized in my initial quote. But I also recognized a number of profound mistakes, and as my knowledge of the topics increased over the months with every book I read about it—foremost Jean-Claude Pressac’s 1989 tome on Auschwitz—I realized that this wasn’t the final word on the matter. Hence I started doing my own research.
After years of forensic research and revisionist publishing activities, I decided in 2005 that Leuchter’s work deserved to be re-published in a second edition—all of his four reports, actually. But considering all the weaknesses that had been discovered in his first report on Auschwitz and Majdanek over the years, the new edition would need to be improved upon. I didn’t want to mess with the original text, though, which by then had itself become a historic icon. I merely included numerous footnotes with corrections, explanations, and further source material, and added a brief discussion of some of the issues raised by Leuchter.
I am glad that The Barnes Review, under the aegis of Willis Carto, has now issued a 3rd edition, which has been brought up to date with the current state of research. Equipped with all the improvements of this third, revised edition, the Leuchter Report is as sharp a weapon in the fight for truth as was the first edition 25 years ago.
The Journal of Historical Review on CODOH
15 November 2012
Believe it or not, to this day the former flagship periodical of historical revisionism, the Journal of Historical Review, which was published between 1980 and 2002 by the Institute for Historical Review in California, has never been posted in its entirety on the Internet. Although two major websites feature many of its articles: (http://tinyurl.com/bx4ghha) and (http://tinyurl.com/asenhd2), neither had the complete set. It was time for this to change.
CODOH volunteers have decided that this is what they will do next. So far, the first ten volumes, published between 1980 and 1990, have been posted at (http://tinyurl.com/ad522qh).
The remaining volumes, 11 through 21, are in the process of being reformatted and posted, and you will see them coming online during the next weeks.
Santiago Alvarez
Contents Manager
Smith's Report No. 194 (November 2012) is Online
16 November 2012
The latest issue of Smith’s Report (no. 194, Nov. 2012) is now available for free online viewing. Bradley Smith's lead article reports on how those obsessed with wallowing in Holocaust “memory” try to keep that delusion alive and pass it down to the next generations. Jett Rucker picks up the topic of Holocaust obsession in his paper, where he describes himself as being obsessed with the Holocaust, although quite differently than the “survivors” and their kin, and he discusses what repercussions the Jewish Holocaust obsession—or tunnel view—has in the world.
Other articles in this issue of Smith’s Report include an exchange on the CODOH Forum about “The Negro Soldier” during the Third Reich fighting for Germany, a delicious exposé by Paul Grubach of Deborah Lipstadt's double standard when it comes to genocide denial—she and her ilk condemn it when it's about their tribe, but embrace it when it's about others, and a paper by Robert Faurisson about the most recent events of his persecution in France and why that won't stop revisionism from prevailing. In addition and as always, this issue of Smith’s Report contains a number of updates and comments about current events.
And then Smith must add yet another note, with apologies: CODOH.com has been down almost all of October into early November, caused by technical difficulties of our overloaded dedicated server. CODOH's dedicated team of volunteers has been working overtime to resolve this. On the one hand, they were successful, as you can see when visiting the site, which now loads fast and without annoying error messages. On the other hand, our information services and donation page being inaccessible was potentially very bad for contributions. It has been very bad again, and this only after Smith had been knocked out himself due to sickness for most of the summer. Smith and his volunteers, who have put in some 20,000 unpaid hours (yes, twenty thousand) into getting the new CODOH.com up and running over the past two years, are on their own. Not quite. They have the visitors of CODOH.com and the readers of Smith’s Report. They urge you to contribute to the cause.
Inconvenient History Winter 2012, Vol. 4, No. 4
25 November 2012
Winter is here! Warm up with the new issue of Inconvenient History. The Winter issue of Inconvenient History is now online.
The papers:
- Editorial: Uncle Sam, May I? by Jett Rucker
- The Rumbula Massacre: A Critical Examination of the Facts, Part 1, by Thomas Kues
- And the War Came, by Ralph Raico
- Unholy Pursuit: The Charles Zentai Case in Australia, by Nigel Jackson
- Why They Said There Were Gas Chambers, by Jett Rucker
- From the Memoirs of a German Soldier, by Nemo Anonymous
- Smoking Crematory Chimney at Auschwitz: A Correction, by Robert Bartec
- Review: In the Garden of Beasts, by Ezra MacVie
If you have anything you're working on that would be suitable and ready for our Spring issue of 2013, please contact the editor at the IH Contact Us page at
Let's Celebrate! CODOH Has Doubled in Size!
25 November 2012
When we got CODOH.com up and running back in June of this year, we started on an ambitious expansion course to get more information posted on our website. At that point, CODOH.com consisted of a little over 1,000 documents. But today we exceeded 2,000 documents. CODOH.com has doubled in size! And this is only the beginning. Plus, needless to say, it's not all about size. We strive to make an increasing amount of well-organized, high-quality information in all formats available to the world.
Currently we are bringing the old issues of the Journal of Historical Review online. The project has reached Vol. 13, no. 5 (September 1993), hence some 60% of all the JHR papers which have ever been published are available on CODOH.com now. We are also in the process of preparing all individual papers from Inconvenient History for posting in the CODOH library, although that project suffered a setback when our volunteer's computer had a hard drive crash, as a result of which he lost all the data (they always tell us to make backups, but we never do – or do we?).
In addition, CODOH is now sponsoring and aggressively pursuing the production of high-quality revisionist video documentaries, and we hope to be able to present the first results early next year.
But for now, bring in the champagne!
Merging CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers
05 December 2012
The image to the right [not published here for technical reasons] was taken out of No. 2, Vol. 4 (June 2000) of the now defunct German revisionist periodical Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung (Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Research). The image announced a close cooperation between the two largest revisionist websites, CODOH.com and www.vho.org (VHO).This cooperation went so far that, in 2003, with CODOH basically down, VHO had almost the entire CODOH contents copied. [Note: In 2003 CODOH lost both its editor and its webmaster to business and family priorities — BRS.]
But then disaster struck in late 2005 with the deportation from the U.S. of Germar Rudolf, and his prosecution and imprisonment by the German State. At that time Rudolf was the sole proprietor of Castle Hill Publishers (CHP), which was and still is the owner of VHO. Although CHP was subsequently taken over by a group of British idealists, the company’s activities decreased drastically in subsequent years.
Today, the VHO website is static, and very few new books are being published independently by CHP. CODOH, on the other hand, has revived its website, and in 2010 decided to vigorously revitalize it by giving it a major overhaul. Now, CODOH.com is equipped with a modern database framework, and is in the process of incorporating the contents of VHO after carefully screening, revising and reformatting those documents.
Considering all this, CODOH and CHP have now come to an agreement to merge their respective websites’ contents. As a matter of fact, they will become one entity. So don’t be surprised if, starting sometime next year, you are trying to go to www.vho.org and end up at www.CODOH.com. It is impossible for the small revisionist community to maintain two large independent database-driven web archives, so it makes sense to merge them. Although CODOH will keep the domain name vho.org, that name will cease to lead to a separate website.
In addition, the British bilingual book outlet Castle Hill Publishers (CHP), once the revisionist powerhouse driven by Germar Rudolf, but after his arrest in 2005 a somewhat neglected orphan, will be brought into the folds of CODOH as its book and video outlet. You will notice that CHP’s online bookstore at https://vho.org/ has a different header, combining the logos of both companies. The same header is also included at the top of this very email. Those ordering from CHP will see similar changes in CHP’s stationery starting with the next billing cycle. In the meantime, our volunteers are busily programming a new, cutting-edge web shop that should come online earlier next year as part of the CODOH website. It will maintain most, if not all, of the items currently offered by the CHP online shop and will then strive to expand its range of items.
CODOH is a U.S. company, but CHP is based in the UK. Whether CHP will ever be relocated to the U.S. remains to be seen. For now it makes sense to keep it where it is, as it gives CODOH access to the European market, whereas the U.S. market is so strongly occupied by both the IHR and, to a much larger extent, The Barnes Review, that when it comes to publishing and selling revisionist books and videos, it makes no sense for CODOH to compete with them in that market.
We employees and volunteers at CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers are looking forward to this new and exciting development, and we are sure that our loyal visitors, customers and supporters will benefit greatly from this as well.
Santiago Alvarez, Manager of the mutual CODOH & VHO/CHP web project
Bradley R. Smith, CEO, CODOH, USA
The CHP Team, Castle Hill Publishers, UK
Oprah and Elie: One's a fool, and one's a fraud. Do you wonder which might be which?
12 December 2012
Being a student, you probably do not watch Oprah Winfrey regularly, but you most likely hear about Elie Wiesel on your campus frequently.
Now Oprah has interviewed Elie again. This interview will air on Sunday, December 9 at 11:00 a.m. ET/PT on OWN. One segment of the interview deals with the opportunity to create new “witnesses” to the Holocaust, a matter that is of considerable interest to (as Norman Finkelstein has it) the Holocaust Industry.
At one point Winfrey asks: “You've said that Holocaust survivors are becoming an endangered species. Indeed, you all are. Yet you don't fear the memory of the Holocaust will ever be lost. Why?”
Wiesel replies: “I'll tell you why. Because, you know, all of us who went through that experience considered ourselves as witnesses. When the last witness will be gone, I don't want to be that one. It's too tragic. What will happen? So on one hand, you could become pessimistic that the last witness—all the knowledge, all the experience, all the memories will be buried. Then what? So I came up with a theory which I think is valid.
“To listen to a witness is to become one… So therefore those who have listened to us, who have read my books and other survivors' memoirs, we have a lot of witnesses now. And they will protect not only our past, but also their future.”
If you want to test how “valid” Elie Wiesel's theory is, it will do you no good to ask your professor. She is committed to belief on this question, not to any kind of examination of the facts of the matter. Here I will give you only a couple suggestions. It's a start. Irene Zisblatt (eyewitness) says that when she was in Auschwitz she swallowed diamonds and shat them out daily for a year or so. See this video at http://tinyurl.com/ay2sg6c
Abraham Bomba, the Barber of Treblinka (eyewitness), tells his demonstrably foolish lies to Claude Lanzmann, the demonstrably foolish creator of the universally applauded film Shoah. Applauded across the board, I might add, by the American professorial class. Read the Bomba text here: http://tinyurl.com/2audupg
I could go on, but these two links alone will introduce you to material that no professor will allow you to question in any classroom on your campus. Ask yourself why that should be.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
Bradley Smith
Note: The above release went to student organizations, the student press, and faculty on campuses across the nation.
Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14 (1994) Complete online
15 December 2012
In the late 1990s, Germar Rudolf decided on his own to post on his website www.vho.org (VHO) all the papers which up to that year had appeared in the Journal of Historical Review (JHR). When he reached volume 13, the publishers of that journal from the Institute of Historical Review asked Rudolf to cease his activity, as they planned to do the remaining issues of the journal in-house.
Fact is, though, that the project faltered. Up to this day, many papers published in the JHR after volume 13, number 1 (January 1993), have never been posted online. To this day, 10 years after the journal has ceased to exist, the former publisher still has not corrected that situation.
We are working hard here to change this. As of now, CODOH's volunteers have posted ALL the papers up to JHR vol. 15, no. 1. Particularly important was their work on volume 14, of which only the papers from the first number had been posted online so far. All the rest were nowhere to be found, with a very few exceptions. But they are all available now on CODOH, including all their illustrations.
If you can, please express your appreciation for this work to our volunteers. Maybe you can chip in to support their work, either by volunteering or by donating to their cause!
Thanks for your consideration
Santiago Alvarez
CODOH Webmaster
Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 15 (1995) Complete online
26 December 2012
Yet another complete year of the Journal of Historical Review (JHR) has been posted at CODOH.com: Volume 15 (1995). Some 10 years ago, the Institute for Historical Review, which used to publish the JHR, had posted 26 of the total of 92 papers which were included in this volume of the JHR, but then the process ended. The volunteers at CODOH have now made all those papers available in the CODOH library!
If you can, please express your appreciation for this work to our volunteers, and maybe you can even chip in to support their work, for instance by reading some of the papers posted and informing us of any typos you may have found or about any other issue. You can also help us by either volunteering in other ways or by donating to our work.
Thank you for your consideration!
Santiago Alvarez
CODOH Webmaster
Not Guilty at Nuremberg –(New Edition)
06 January 2013
Castle Hill Publishers and CODOH are proud to announce the availability of a new, revised edition of a revisionist classic:
Not Guilty at Nuremberg: The German Defense Case
By Carlos Porter
Uninformed people consider the “Nuremberg War Crimes Trials” as the ultimate proof of the guilt of the German leadership before and during World War II. The transcripts of the proceedings, however, tell an entirely different story.
This volume contains the defense argument put forward by the main defendants at the trial. It shows that the trial broke every legal precedent and procedure of evidence in the book.
Defendants were refused the right to cross-examine “witnesses,” blatantly forged documents were accepted as genuine without question, and evidence indicating torture of suspects was struck out by order of the judges.
In addition, the blatant contradictions in the prosecution argument (which saw the Germans charged with the exact same behavior as exhibited by the Allies during the war), combined with the persuasive counterarguments from the defendants themselves, provide a fascinating insight into the 1946 lynch-mob proceedings which masqueraded as “trials.”
Second revised edition, 60 pp. paperback, 26 b/w ill., 2012 (ENG)
Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 16 (1996/97) Complete online
07 January 2013
And again, another complete year of the Journal of Historical Review (JHR) has been posted at CODOH.com: Volume 16 (1996/97). Some 10 years ago, the Institute for Historical Review had posted 40 of the total of 70 papers which were included in this volume of the JHR, but did nothing more with it. Today CODOH volunteers have again remedied that situation. Now all the papers from that volume are available in the CODOH library!
If you can, please express your appreciation for this work by reading some of the papers posted and informing us of any typos you may have found or about any other issue.
Santiago Alvarez
CODOH Webmaster
Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 17 (1998) Complete online
31 January 2013
Another complete year of the Journal of Historical Review (JHR) has been posted at CODOH.com: volume 17 (1998). Some 10 years ago, the Institute for Historical Review, which used to publish the JHR, had posted only 46 of the total of 78 papers which were included in this volume of the JHR. CODOH volunteers have once more remedied that situation. Now ALL the papers in that issue are available in the CODOH library!
Santiago Alvarez
CODOH Webmaster
Holocaust Handbooks – 4pp. Color Promotion Flyer Available Free!
01 February 2013
Groundbreaking Books on the Biggest Taboo of the Western World
This ambitious series addresses various topics of the infamous “Holocaust” of the WWII era. Most of them are based on decades of research in archives all over the world. They are heavily footnoted and referenced. In contrast to most other works on this issue, this series approaches its topic with the necessary academic scrutiny and critical attitude. Any Holocaust researcher ignoring this series will remain oblivious to the most important research results in the field.
These books are designed to have the power to convince both the common reader and academics in the field. And it is very successful with this approach: With its inception, this prestigious series has gained the attention of many western historians and of several opinion leaders worldwide. The final goal is to eventually tip the academic scale, so that academia will begin doing its duty: to demand public scrutiny of this most influential topic in all western societies. So long as academics do not do this, media and politicians will not do it either.
Order information can be found on CODOH's dedicated pages for each book in the series, or on the website at www.holocausthandbooks.com/.
Copyright Notice: All of these books are available for download free of charge. They have been released to the public domain for educational purposes only. They may be copied and distributed free of charge only. No commercial use is permitted. If copied and distributed, no changes to the books are permitted without the prior written consent of the books' author(s)/editor(s).
So far 24 volumes have appeared in this series, and more are in the works. You can download a free brochure describing all 24 books here: http://tinyurl.com/b7bu5xb
THE CODOH FORUM
http://forum.codoh.info/index.php
Here I want to indicate primarily how many viewers the CODOH Forum is attracting. First, a couple of very brief opening paragraphs of the two most widely viewed topics, followed by the titles of the primary runner-ups. Before the Web, before CODOH, these figures would have been, simply, impossible.
Cyanide Chemistry at Auschwitz
129,053 Views
“The 1988 ‘Leuchter Report’ published a list of cyanide measurements taken from several Auschwitz labour-camp walls [1]. Its text did not comment upon them however and they were merely summarised in a graph. Cyanide was measurable in 14 out of 35 of these samples (by Alpha laboratories), the rest being below the threshold of detection, one part per million (i.e., 1 mg cyanide per kilogram of wall). Then, in 1997, a Mr Desjardins retraced Leuchter’s steps, and he ascertained, or claimed, that ten of these samples had come from sheltered, unexposed locations [2]. Of these, seven had measurable levels of cyanide. Comparing the two mean values of Leuchter’s data, grouped according to Desjardins’s information, including only those of measurable value, gives us:
“Indoor, sheltered walls: 2.7 ppm (n=7) Leuchter’s Data / Exposed, unsheltered walls 2.8 ppm (n=7), showing no significant difference. This throws light on the question as to whether decades of weathering have removed cyanide from the walls, as was alleged in certain quarters. Clearly, it hasn’t. This is totally crucial.
“When Germar Rudolf published the data, he specified the location of Leuchter’s samples. [3] This indicated that 15 of them in total had come from the alleged homicidal gas chambers, AHGCs, of Kremas I and II. (The ‘allegation’ here, is that, as Pressac described [4], what were the morgues of these crematoria came to be utilised as human gas chambers.) Six of these were measurable and had come from Krema II. Taking only those samples whose cyanide levels were measurable, we obtain these mean values: [… .]”
Auschwitz In Memoriam
15,624 Views
“Violently incompatible stories swirl about the little town of Oswiecim/Auschwitz, as if two quite different places had somehow managed to co-exist there, sixty years ago. These stories cannot all be true. The United Nations has requested that Holocaust Memorial Day be commemorated on January 27th—the day the Auschwitz camp was ‘liberated’ in 1945. Let us make a website to honour this day, i.e. one which will hold a memory of the Auschwitz camp. It could somewhat resemble major ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ sites (e.g. http://www.hmd.org.uk/about/), but its focus would be on the titanic struggle between Lies and the Truth.
“To counteract the Greatest Lie Ever Told, I suggest focusing on concrete details of how the wartime labour-camp functioned. For example, an aesthetically elegant swimming-pool clearly exists, and was built by the inmates. Unable to deny this, the authorities have erected a sign saying, ‘Fire brigade reservoir built in the form of a swimming pool.’ This absurd notice is also given in Hebrew—but even that won’t make it true.
“Let us hope for the publication in English of a proper book about what the camp was like. Was there really an in-camp court and jail functioning (opposite the gynecological facility)? Can we hear more about the marriages conducted at Auschwitz, the pregnancies there, the 3,000 live births recorded at the maternity hospital, and how did the child care day-centre work? There might be a problem with finding a publisher …”
The missing six million 250483 Views World War II Aerial Reconnaissance Photos Go Online !!
78,258 Views
Alleged Photos from the Reinhardt Camps and Chelmno
58,006 Views
Dr. Michael Shermer, Professional Skeptic…almost
31,352 Views
The Ever Diminishing Numbers of Jewish Dead at Auschwitz
29,238 Views
Altered WWII Aerial Photos – The 'Smoking Guns'
27,299 Views
More than 350,000 views on these few topics alone. Such a readership in any other media is unimaginable. Go to The Forum here: http://tinyurl.com/aserkqe
In May 2011 Facebook had an estimated 130 million unique visitors in America alone. It is now estimated that Facebook has over one billion (billion!) users worldwide.
While it is a matchless organizational concept, the concept is simple. Users create a personal file, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and include automatic notifications when they update their profile. Users create or join common-interest groups, organized by workplace, school, college, or other associations.
When Hernandez was here he set up a page for us and took care of it. It cost a few hours a week. He posted materials from the Campus Project and from what was happening at the various pages on CODOHWeb. Several interesting people began posting on the site but I was busy with the Campus Project, with Smith’s blog, and all the back and forth that is how it is around here.
A couple months back, when the worst was over with the restructuring of CODOH, it was time for me to decide what to do with my own Founder’s Page, with Smith’s Blog, with Facebook. I could not do them all. Ideally, I should do one only and incorporate the other two into the one. That’s the way I was thinking.
At first I thought it would be The Founder’s Page. Then I thought it would work best to use Smith’s Blog with The Founder’s Page as the back-up website. But I could do on Facebook what I could do with the blog, and there was a huge audience waiting for me on Facebook if I could find it. It seemed to me that there were an endless number of details to work out. I couldn’t decide.
Oddly, it was Paloma who broke the riddle for me. She made two observations that I already understood but that I had not taken into account. The first was that “nobody” uses blogs any longer, they use Facebook. While that is not true actually, I understood that she was going in a right direction. The interconnectedness of Facebook accounts places Facebook in a whole new world that blogs simply do not access.
But then, with regard to outreach, the work that I am primarily concerned with, Paloma observed that instead of, or in addition to, sending to individual email addresses on campuses, I could focus on campus Facebook pages.
That was it! If we can send to 20 Facebook pages at a given campus, and each of them averages 20 friends, each of whom averages 20 friends, and they are all talking to each other … we could gain access to thousands of students and friends of students—on that one campus and on campuses where those students have friends! Brilliant! I had an actual concept for using Facebook. It can’t happen overnight, but we can get is started.
Paloma is putting together our first lists of Facebook URLs. It will be a hit-and-miss proposition. I will have to work it out campus by campus, list by list. But the concept is there. It’s simple, it’s doable, and I am going to go with it.
THE AMAZON KINDLE
Amazon.com is the largest book retailer on the Internet—in the world. Richard Widmann, the young man (then) who back in the 1990s was instrumental in getting me to create a webpage for CODOH and who founded the quarterly journal Inconvenient History four years ago, was now telling me to get my Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist into the Amazon Kindle program. I had nothing against it, but I stalled. I felt like I had a lot on my plate. If I were to offer Confessions via the Kindle, what would happen? I’d sell a few books, but would it be worth the while? Widmann was a little pushy with me on the issue, so I decided to look into the program.
I understood that Amazon is the largest bookseller on the Internet. It sells more hardcopy books than any other retailer, but I did not know that beginning in 2010 it is selling more e-books via Kindle than it is selling hardcopy/paperback books. I’d had no idea. And this is at a time when sales of paperback books themselves are growing as well. But Kindle is growing faster.
Okay.
I learned that the Kindle Keyboard is ready to use right out of the box—no setup, no software to install, no computer required. You can get a book downloaded in about 60 seconds. You can download and read first chapters for free before you decide to buy. With Text-to-Speech, Kindle Keyboard can read English-language content out loud to you. Kindle's E Ink screen reads like real paper, with no glare. Reads as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room. It holds 3,500 books (!). You can carry your library with you wherever you go. You can even share meaningful passages with friends and family with built-in Twitter and Facebook integration.
And then the concept appeared before me. I should have seen it by myself, but… . There will be a way for me to send a first chapter of Confessions to all my email lists, on campus and off. Each send will have a link to the Kindle program. Not only that, now I would be able to send it to the Facebook URLs we are collecting. It fits right in with everything. No one who receives my message will have to go to CODOH and check out Confessions. With Kindle they will be able to download the entire book for $2 or $3. Privately. Price will be no issue. Ordering will be no issue.
The concept is there. It’s simple. It fits in with everything. Using Kindle is now part of the Campus Project. While there is no doubt that I will sell some books, the point is to get Confessions into the hands of as many students and all other good folk on campus and off as possible. Something could come of this. No promises, but something could come of it.
The concept is there.
Meanwhile, Jett Rucker, the man of all trades and professions, has already “Kindleized” Confessions and it could be up on the Amazon page by the time you have this issue of SR to hand.
I have had reason to reflect on my good fortune doing this work. On how remarkable it is that CODOH continues to draw volunteers to help with the many different aspects of the work. I am very fortunate that guys like Richard Thomas, Richard Widmann, our ex-webmaster who we addressed as “All Knowing,” the men who monitor the Forum, Santiago and his crew who have transformed CODOH.com, Jett Rucker and others would choose to associate themselves with CODOH rather than going elsewhere, or starting up something of their own.
I told one correspondent that most likely these folk chose to be around here rather than someplace else because of my personal charm. My correspondent did not respond to this claim. Then night before last I dreamed that I had repeated the claim about my charm to my wife. In the dream she just looked me with an expressionless gaze. She was still looking at me that way when I woke up. I have a feeling it’s just as well that I woke when I did.
*** “You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers.
“This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
—Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
The American press. More than 200 years ago. Not a great deal has changed. But we do have the internet now, the Web, at least for the time being. All told, we are using it fairly well. Not as well as we should be using it, but…
Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, No. 195, February 2013, pp. 1f., 7-13
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