CODOH’s Christmas 2017 Message

‘Tis the season again, Christmas, Yuletide, Hanukkah… Whatever the case may be for you, we hope that you are able to enjoy it to its fullest potential.

We at CODOH and Castle Hill Publishers take this opportunity to summarize for you all the events of 2017 that were essential to us. This year, we have split our report into four sections:

• Media Production
• Public Relations
• The Forum
• CODOH’s Board of Trustees

Media Production

In 2010, Castle Hill Publishers signed an agreement with The Barnes Review, then still controlled by the late Willis Carto and his wife, to transfer publishing control of the series Holocaust Handbooks over to them, while Castle Hill Publishers kept editorial control. At the end of 2015, both partners agreed to give full editorial, publishing and distribution control for the entire series back to Castle Hill Publishers. Hence, for Castle Hill Publishers’s Media Production Manager Germar Rudolf, the year 2016 was among other things dominated by getting all the books reissued in new editions or reprints that The Barnes Review had published between 2010 and 2015, and by placing all these books for the first time ever into all available national and international distribution and sales channels. As we progressed, sales of our books were steadily increasing, in some cases even reaching the sales of similar books of our opponents. As the year 2017 started, 75% of that project had been carried out.

By March 2017, only two of the 34 volumes of the series were left to be issued. But then, Amazon, bullied by The Lobby who must have gotten scared of our success, pulled the emergency brakes by banning almost all of our books and by first suspending and then closing the book production account we had with them. Since sales through Amazon amounted to some 50% of Castle Hill Publishers’s turnover, this censorship hit Castle Hill Publishers hard. Ironically, CODOH has benefitted from that development somewhat, because sales through Castle Hill Publishers’ website hosted by CODOH have increased slightly following Amazon’s murder of revisionism. Since CODOH can keep all credit-card proceeds earned through Castle Hill Publishers’ website, CODOH got lucky. These credit-card sales amount to more than 80% of CODOH’s entire revenue.

Castle Hill Publishers’s book production, however, has slumped as a consequence, and that is not good for any one of us in the long run. The main reason for this is the fact that the main expense in this book-publishing business is translating manuscripts from other languages into English and/or German. Financing these translations has become a challenge. As a result, of the many projects we initially planned to realize in 2017, only three major ones made it across the finish line (we ignore here the release of new editions with only minor changes, some of them implemented merely to temporarily circumvent Amazon’s blacklisting):

• The Chemistry of Auschwitz (a thoroughly revised and updated edition of the so-called Rudolf Report)
• Lectures on the Holocaust, 3rd, thoroughly revised and updated edition
• Commandant of Auschwitz

Other projects are stuck in various stages of translations:

• The Giant with Feet of Clay (greatly enhanced edition; volunteer translator abandoned the project)
• An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (translator dropped the project)
• The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied Eastern Territories (professional translator hired)
• Auschwitz: Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon B (stuck in peer review due to quality issues; project postponed due to other projects having priority)
• plus a number of books and documentaries to be translated into German (volunteer inefficiency accounts for translation times of several years in some case, and still not getting anywhere…)

As you can see, when depending on unpaid volunteers, we and in extension all our readers are subject to our benefactors’ vicissitudes, and that’s often troublesome. To improve this state of affairs, we have launched a crowd-funding webpage to raise the funds needed to finalize our ambitious projects using professional translators. Commandant of Auschwitz was the first to benefit from this, and the swiftly progressing translation of Carlo Mattogno’s two-volume work on the Einsatzgruppen has also been financed by our generous donors.

Thank you to all our funding benefactors!

Another major change was our parting of ways with filmmaker Eric Hunt in early 2017. Video production has now been taken over by a team of volunteers who had to learn the trade from scratch. With a number of documentaries produced by that team, we were actually more successful here than with our books, since we do not depend on having to translate anything. As a matter of fact, despite struggling to learn the trade, we managed to produce as many documentaries in one year as our predecessor did in three years:

• The Lies and Deceptions of Deborah Lipstadt: Part 2
• The Chemistry of Auschwitz
• Germany, Country under the Rule of Law
• Probing the Holocaust: The Horror Explained, Part 1 (a completely revised edition of Hunt’s Questioning the Holocaust)

And we’ve only just begun…

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to everyone!

Public Relations

CODOH’s long-time associate Roberto Hernandez has been assigned new tasks this year besides writing articles for the CODOH blog and managing the Campus Project outreach.

At the beginning of this year, he took over full management of the CODOH Blog. This includes posting news items, articles and any updates of interest to our readership.

On average, the CODOH blog gets fed three to four times a week with articles and news items, and now we have included video memorabilia that we have been able to collect online. Among them are old VHS videos posted in recent years in a digitized format, which allow CODOH’s viewers to get a much better idea of the many years of struggle that revisionists have sustained since the early 1980s. As a matter of fact, the struggle has been going on for much longer than that, but currently our video material doesn’t reach farther back.

Hernandez is in touch with key revisionists outside the USA, so when they want to distribute their material, we are able to help out. We have also become much more efficient in distributing news about what goes on with other revisionists who are persecuted where freedom of speech is abridged even more than in the Anglosphere.

Among the major tasks for this year was the revival of our CODOH YouTube channel that had been managed by Eric Hunt until early 2017. When Hernandez took over the channel in spring of 2017, it contained only 15 videos. Evidently, the channel had not been maintained efficiently. For those unfamiliar with what a YouTube channel is: it contains a number of videos uploaded by a YouTube account owner, regardless of whether these videos are created by the account owner or by others. After having managed CODOH’s YouTube account for little more than half a year, Hernandez managed to increase the number of revisionist videos contained in it to 154 (as of Dec. 14, 2017)! In addition, our Media Production Manager Germar Rudolf has done an amazing job of heading a team that creates documentaries of our own, which we did not expect him to pull off that quickly. These documentaries have been very successful at attracting new viewers; his first documentary on Deborah Lipstadt is a real hit.

In addition to our CODOH channel, we also have the Holocaust Handbooks YouTube channel, managed by that same Germar Rudolf, which focuses on full-length quality documentaries on the Holocaust, similar to the books of that series.

Here are some numbers that give you an idea of the outreach potentials of our YouTube accounts as of December 15, 2017:

When I was given the CODOH channel to manage, the number of subscribers stood at some 300. It has since grown by a factor of almost five.

In addition to posting our videos on YouTube, we also share them with our subscribers on Facebook and Twitter, a fact that certainly contributes considerably to our increased subscriber numbers and viewing rates.

Every time we post a new video on the CODOH channel, a little after 6am the next morning we receive an email from YouTube notifying us that our new video has been banned from all European YouTube sites. That process is so automatic that even non-Holocaust videos are banned that way, for instance our documentary on the German legal system or a believer video we posted several weeks ago. Hence, our account is flagged. At some point we might face account closure by YouTube.

To circumvent European censorship, and to have a backup plan in case YouTube shuts us down, we have signed up for a paid account at the video-sharing website VIMEO. This new project is moving along slowly, because our subscription plan limits the bandwidth we can use for video uploads.

The Campus Project is still alive and kicking, but we have to constantly change what we are doing, because the censors are always hot on our heels, and it seems like students are not really paying attention to campus newspapers anymore these days, if they ever did, so we have to find new venues to spread the good news of Holocaust revisionism.

The Forum

Even throughout 2017, The Revisionist CODOH Forum at https://forum.codoh.com/ has been the world’s leading forum to discuss modern history with a skeptical mindset. As of Dec. 15, 2107, the forum had:

• 75,988 posts in
• 9,909 topics (threads), posted by a total of
• 1,430 active members

Not only do we discuss the ‘holocaust’ narrative, which is certainly our main emphasis, but we have other discussion forums defined either by historical topic or by posting language:

• ‘Holocaust’ Debate / Comments / News
• Forum Révisionniste en Français
• Deutsches revisionistisches Forum
• Foro revisionista en español
• Skandinaviskt revisionistiskt forum
• WWII Europe / Atlantic Theater Revisionist Forum
• WWII Asia / Pacific Theater Revisionist Forum
• WWI Revisionist Forum

What separates us from other, less rigorous ‘holocaust’ debating sites? In one word: reasonable Guidelines that prevent the usual spam, trolling, name calling, slander, and dodging. I quote:

• No name calling, period.
• The CODOH Revisionist Forum forbids any threats or personal attacks against others; we will not tolerate links to sites which do engage in such behavior. We’re about debate and only debate.”

For good measure, I have created a thread for those who have complaints.

The most popular topic is the thread on “Cyanide Chemistry at Auschwitz“ with 203,559 views. Here the technical aspects of the alleged gas chambers of Auschwitz and Birkenau are discussed in some detail. The salient point being that these alleged ‘industrialized machines of death’ could not have functioned as is alleged. In essence, one can argue about various “eyewitnesses”, “code words”, Show Trials, alleged Nazi statements, etc., which we certainly do; but if an alleged event could not scientifically & physically have happened as alleged, then it did not happen as alleged.

What we have established with the Forum is a veritable database of ‘holocaust’ related claims and the rebuttals to them. Keyword searches will get results immediately. This is, of course, very convenient for truth seekers, but most inconvenient for “The Holocaust Industry.”

There’s simply nothing quite like The CODOH Forum.

Merry Christmas to everyone, and a Happy New Year!

CODOH’s Board of Trustees

2017 saw the continuance of two trends; the further unraveling of the official Holocaust story, and further frantic efforts of Holocaust Believers at stifling Revisionist discussion. Direct criminal prosecution has been augmented by a program of blacklisting and cancellation of service.

Background

Prior to 2014, the efforts at suppressing free speech focused on criminalization of Revisionism under the guise of preventing “Disparagement of the Memory of Deceased Persons” or “inciting hatred.” But prosecution of Revisionist scholars was not entirely satisfactory to Believers; jailing people for expressing honest opinions created inconvenient publicity, and legal details were often hard to prove. The 2015 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Turkish politician Dogu Perincek also caused problems. The Court found that denying the Armenian Holocaust was legally protected free speech, an embarrassing contrast with the criminal prosecutions of Revisionists. The biggest problem of all for Believers continues to be the First Amendment to the US Constitution and its protection of Free Speech in the United States.

Blacklisting

To circumvent traditional legal protections in the US and Britain, Believers have shifted to stealth mode, a cowardly program of blacklisting and denial of service. The first prong of the attack was the adoption of the new greatly expanded legal definition of anti-Semitism as created by the EU Monitoring Center of Racism and Xenophobia. The new definition includes expressing doubt about certain details of the Holocaust as anti-Semitic. This has created a widely accepted justification for the avoidance of honest research, the banning of books, and the blacklisting of scholars. British Prime Minister Theresa May led the way, announcing her government would adopt a “working definition” of anti-Semitism. See “Government Leads the Way in Tackling Anti-Semitism.”

Ironically, the same groups who are moving to criminalize the blacklisting and boycotts of Israel are pressuring Yahoo, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook to blacklist and boycott Revisionist businesses. Amazon was the first to crumble. In March it pulled revisionist books from its websites, most of them published by Castle Hill Publishers. The reason given to us was that our books were in an unspecified violation of their “content guidelines,” which by their wording allow anything to be banned (“What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.”). Later Amazon insisted that we need to “improve the quality” of our books for any future submissions to be accepted. Several requests to inform us which aspects of our books are of unacceptably low quality were answered by automatic replies pointing us to the content guidelines. Since we did not promise to abstain from publishing revisionist books in the future – which is probably what they wanted to hear without every expressly saying so – they eventually closed our account. Credit-card-merchant cancellations and PayPal refusal of service have also occurred in the past, which is the reason why CODOH cannot accept PayPal payments.

The second prong of the attack was performed by the German government. On June 30, the Bundestag passed the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which, under cover of fighting “fake news” and “hate speech,” creates a legal framework for censorship of the Internet. The law was introduced by German Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas, a Social Democratic politician. It broke legal precedents with draconian provisions that punish Internet providers and corporate employees for not rigorously censoring the web. The law takes full effect in January 2018. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/05/cens-o05.html

CODOH has done its best to speak out against the oppressive trends, sending letters to publishers, free speech groups, interested parties such as Palestinian American groups, and even the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee. https://codoh.com/library/document/4598/. Our letters point out reasons why it is wrong to call us anti-Semitic, and we put forth the traditional defenses of Free Speech. Generally, we have had no response, but we will keep trying!

Once more Merry Christmas to everyone, and a Happy New Year!