Catching Up

For the past several years, CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers have been intertwined both financially and with their web presence. Back in the summer of 2013, Castle Hill, back then still hosted with an online store at www.vho.org, lost its ability to accept credit-card payments in the UK, mainly due to the interference of New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind.[1] After that, a deal was struck between Castle Hill and CODOH to host Castle Hill’s online bookstore on CODOH’s server and make it accessible through a CODOH subdomain, shop.codoh.com. In return for CODOH providing the ability to process plastic-money payments for that shop, Castle Hill shared a good chunk of the proceeds from such transactions with increasingly cash-strapped CODOH.

Keeping the ability to process card payments has been at times challenging over the past five years, because our contracts get cancelled on average every other year or so, usually due to the third-party interference into our payment contracts by Hikind and his ilk. Yet still, this deal between CODOH and Castle Hill has had positive synergy effects for both companies, so we’ll keep sailing along this course.

Inconvenient History was taken under the publishing wings of CODOH in 2015, and I took over editorial control of this periodical from Richard Widmann step by step last year. That might have looked like a good idea to Richard, since I evidently have plenty of experience with publishing revisionist periodicals: Between 1997 and 2005, I published the German revisionist periodical Vierteljahreshefte für freie Ge­schichts­for­schung (which translates to Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry – now look at Inconvenient History’s subtitle!), and between 2003 and 2005, I issued the English-language periodical The Revisionist.

However, there are two flies in the ointment. In the years 1999-2005, I was merely involved in handling a fledgling Castle Hill with a small albeit growing book program encompassing only a few dozen titles at most at the end of this phase, and I was single throughout most of this time, hence had plenty of time on my hands.

My current situation is decidedly different compared to that. Castle Hill currently has a book program approaching 200 titles. Maintaining this operation gets increasingly challenging, particularly after 40% of the company’s turnover suddenly got cut out by Amazon deciding in March 2017 to ban us from their sales platform. Add to this that managing CODOH responsibly fell in my lap in 2014, when Bradley Smith decided to reorganize his creation into a Trust, and then slowly retired from the project.

In addition, I am now married, and have to run a household as a stay-at-home dad of three school-age kids, two of which are special-needs children. My wife has a career, long commutes, and after work spends time studying at an online university to get additional credits required to get licensed in her field in Pennsylvania. Hence, there is little if any spousal support at home.

There is only so much one person can do. That’s the first fly.

The second is that too much responsibility for all major Holocaust revisionist operations is in one hand. We shouldn’t have all our eggs in one basket, particularly when there are so many people, organizations and governments out to break them!

To make this work somehow until we find others willing to chip in, take on responsibilities, share the burden, spread the risk, secure the chances of organizational survival, I have to bank on more synergy effects by intertwining things more. So far, Inconvenient History has been standing on the sidelines, not consistently, proactively and systematically paying attention to what was going on at Castle Hill in particular. If Castle Hill issues anything new, Inconvenient History needs to report, scrutinize and, as appropriate, laud or critique Castle Hill’s publishing efforts. Since I am in charge of both entities, conflicts of interest will arise. But make no mistake: if Castle Hill fails, CODOH and Inconvenient History are in serious danger of simply disappearing. Castle Hill is the engine that drives the entire operation. Therefore, let’s work together to make sure this engine runs smoothly and succeeds. As a result of these my musings, I will start, with this issue, reporting about what Castle Hill has been up to in the recent past, and will introduce new and revised products launched or relaunched. Having neglected this in the past, I have some catching up to do. I hope you will bear with me.

[1]    See Richard A. Widmann, “Hate, Hikind and History,” Inconvenient History, 5(3) (2013); https://codoh.com/library/document/hate-hikind-and-history-1/.