Internet Roundup

The great war theoretician Sun Tzu declared, “Speed is the essence of war.” Today it would be fair to paraphrase Sun Tzu and write, “Speed is the essence of the Internet.” Comparisons of the Internet to “super highways” abound in today’s news media. What is the point of such metaphors? Clearly, the intention is to describe the speed of movement of information over great distances. “Speed” can be said to have supplanted “space” in today’s communication possibilities.

Four short months ago, I recounted my trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in the pages of Smith's Report (see SR 43). I discussed the showcase exhibit of the USHMM, their replica of a “gas chamber” door. In that article I accepted exterminationist Jean-Claude Pressac’s theory that the door was in fact the door to a delousing installation, not a homicidal gas chamber. Today, thanks to the speed of information exchange on the Internet, and the trail-blazing material posted to CODOHWeb, I can safely say that Pressac, as well as the USHMM, has once again been shown to be in error.

The past few months have seen a major advance in our understanding of the actual function of the alleged gas chambers and their (until now) mysterious fittings. CODOHWeb has published two powerful articles by Samuel Crowell, “Technique and Operation of German Anti-Gas Shelters in World War II: A Refutation of J.C. Pressac’s ‘Criminal Traces’” and the brand-new “Defending Against the Allied Bombing Campaign: Air Raid Shelters and Gas Protection in Germany, 1939-1945.” Crowell’s analysis, supported by contemporary war-time photographs from German civil defense literature of airraid shelter doors, proves beyond doubt that what the USHMM has displayed is nothing more than a “replica” of a door to save lives from the Allied incendiary holocaust from the air.

In the same short span of time, Fredrick Toben, director of The Adelaide Institute, who accompanied me during my tour of the USHMM, has been charged with violating “s.18C of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act of 1975” for placing various revisionist materials on the World Wide Web. A complaint filed by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) claims, among other things, that the Adelaide Institute web site (http://www.adam.com.au/fredadin/adins.html) “seeks to present the Nazi Genocide not as a matter of fact but as an opinion held by a group of individuals acting with malicious intent, who are opposed by persons fighting to establish the ‘truth’, i.e. that the Holocaust is a myth.” (For more information see: Adelaide Institute, September 1997, No. 60, POBox 3300, Norwood, 5067 Australia). The complaint against Dr. Toben will be heard on September 29th.

Although it is uncertain that the ECAJ is acting with “malicious intent,” it certainly is limiting intellectual freedom through its attempt to curtail an honest evaluation of the facts surrounding the Holocaust story. It has been noted recently in SR and elsewhere that, based on the reaction of our “opponents,” the Internet must be today’s most important medium for the publication and distribution of revisionist research. Furthermore, the intensifying threats to historical inquiry evoked by fear of the power and freedom of the Internet have emboldened courageous young scholars like Samuel Crowell to become involved with revisionism. Groups like the ECAJ have yet to realize that with each new blow they strike against freedom, revisionist resolve is deepened.

The Internet has armed revisionists with a powerful new weapon. Not so long ago it took months and sometimes years before new revisionist works could be made available to the public. Today an article can be put into proper “code” and uploaded to the World Wide Web on the day the author completes it. Every month we post new revisionist articles and news items on CODOHWeb which otherwise would take many months and a great many dollars to make available—to a significantly smaller audience. The World Wide Web provides revisionism with not only speed of “publication,” but with a world-wide audience of prospective readers.

Today, thanks to the Internet, millions of readers are only a “dick” away from CODOHWeb and the discovery of the “other side” of the most provocative historical controversy taking place today. Thanks to the Internet, revisionists have the ability to correct the historical record many times faster than was possible before. Speed certainly is the essence of the Internet, and for those on the front lines like Dr. Toben and Samuel Crowell, it is fair to say that the struggle over control of the Internet oftentimes resembles war.