Department of Defense Targets CODOH and the Campus Project

We recently received a copy of a published report titled Holocaust Revisionism, in which both CODOH and its director, yours truly, figure prominently. Neither that, nor the fact that the document relies heavily on stock ADL “anti-anti-Semitic” boilerplate, nor the circumstance that its text is extraordinarily banal, would by itself merit treating Holocaust Revisionism separately here.

What distinguishes Holocaust Revisionism is that it was issued under the aegis of something called the “Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute.” Though you may not have heard of “DEOMI” (as the inevitable acronym goes), any tax payments you may have made recently are helping support it. since it is the offspring of the U.S. Department of Defense. Furthermore, Holocaust Revisionism intends to influence morale within our military forces: distribution of this pamphlet is advocated to the armed forces' “equal opportunity” personnel as well as to “selected senior officials to aid them in their duties” (p. i).

The writing of Holocaust Revisionism's author, Captain Carlos Huerta, a U.S. Army chaplain, is oddly sourced (he often references his own journalistic mishmashes of revisionist ideas rather than the original revisionist text); and replete with distortions and misstatements of fact. To take a salient instance of Captain Huerta’s fumblings with the way things really were, he writes regarding CODOH’s Campus Project advertisements: “In all cases where the ad was run, the deciding factor in the students' minds was the need to support the First Amendment” (p. 9). It may be that the inspiration for this nonsense was the ineffable Alan Dershowitz, since the “Dersh” surfaces a sentence later as the source of the opinion that “the decision to run or not to run the advertisement is not a First Amendment issue.”

Whether that is true or not, in the strictly lawyerly sense in which Professor Dershowitz chooses to treat it, the fact remains that in the larger sense of liberality, intellectual maturity, openness to ideas suppressed or persecuted elsewhere—in short, in terms of what has long been thought to be the very idea of a university—student journalists at scores of American universities, often in the face of hectoring from university administrators and powerful off-campus Jewish pressure groups (just exercising their First Amendment rights, don’tcha know?), stood up for intellectual freedom and ran CODOH’s ad. Not, please note, out of subservience to the First Amendment. And, by the way, they’re still at it!

It must be said that author Huerta labors to be fair, within his limited purview. For all that, his “report” is nothing more than a catalogue of revisionists and their imagined activities and points of view, with the unfailing observation in each case that revisionist findings are unscholarly and have been refuted elsewhere. For the padre, the bedrock truths of the Holocaust, despite his rote bow s to the “scholarly” methods (never elucidated) of such Exterminationist kingpins as Raul Hilberg, seem to exist in a netherworld of belief and obedience, hovering somewhere between the articles of Revelation and the U.S. Army’s General Orders. Cpt. Huerta's affectation of the surface pieties of intellectual openness vanish on his pamphlet's last page, however, where one reads that:

A successful fighting force is a cohesive one, one where all members have respect for each other' s diversity and dignity. Holocaust revisionism has the potential to destroy that respect… Holocaust revisionism is a real force, such as racism, hatred, or discrimination, that must be dealt with. Not to deal with it is not to give our members in uniform the support that they need to defend this Nation. (p. 12)

Huerta’s call to replace First Amendment freedoms for servicemen and women with rote allegiance to the moldy propaganda falsehoods of another war. ended over half a century ago, isn't Department of Defense policy—just yet. Latter-day descendants of Roy Cohn and David Schine, who pestered military librarians in search of Marxist literature to the titillation of liberals in the early 1950's, aren’t on the job searching for revisionist books (to corresponding hosannas)—just yet. But we thank Cpt. Huerta for putting us on the alert.

[Our researcher did not discover until deadline that the “padre” is a “rabbi.” It’s interesting to consider the fact that—it doesn’t matter!]