New CODOH Ad Appearing in Student Newspapers

This is the one! A concept that would have been impossible for me to develop even a few months ago. An advertisement appearing in college newspapers that is tied directly to the Campus Internet Project on the World Wide Web. An ad that is small, inexpensive, difficult to refuse, and offers a generous slice of important information to students, faculty and everyone else – free!

You may think the way this idea came to me is a little odd, but it's my experience this sort of thing is more commonplace than many think. One afternoon after I got my mother out of bed, dressed her and combed her hair and wheeled her out to the living room so we could give her dinner while she watched Peter Jennings, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, I left her in care of my wife, folded up a recent edition of the London Review, put it in my back pocket, got on Magaly's boyfriend's bicycle and peddled downtown to the Main Street Dinner and Bar to bend my elbow with a couple friends.

The entire 40-foot front of the Main Street Diner is glassed and the bar faces the window so you can talk with your friends and watch the cars and pedestrians pass back and forth, which on late October afternoons with the sun setting over the roofs of the storefronts can be almost lovely. So I parked the bike and walked inside, put the London Review on the bar, ordered a Harp and was standing there contentedly – well, torpidly I suppose (I think it helps in these particular moments to be a little torpid) – looking at the red sunset and the orange and pink and pale blue sky that overhead had the first shadow of night in it when the idea came to me. It didn't come to me exactly, but to my ear. It was as if God had paused from His labor of setting the sun to pass through the Main Street Diner and Bar and blow a little poof of air in my right ear.

Poof – and there it was, the concept for the Campus Project on the World Wide Web full blown, with all the implications of it fully understood, and even a picture of the new CODOH ad there before me. It was like a miracle. How the devil do those things happen? I don't think they are all that rare. I got excited and wanted to tell my friend Rich but he'd been drinking beer for a couple hours and he was talking to some other guys and when I tried to interrupt and he understood I wanted to talk about the holocaust he turned away. I suppose he thought there was no point in ruining a perfectly fine afternoon.

I was too agitated now to read the London Review. I would place a one-inch, one-column classified advertisement in student newspapers at universities all over the country offering David Cole's 46 unanswered questions about the Nazi gas chambers, free, on the World Wide Web. I would give the address of the CODOH Website. Any computer-literate student on any campus in America will be able to download the 46 Questions. If a student doesn't have a computer he can ask one of his friends who does to do it for him. If he doesn't have a friend with a computer he can go to the campus library or other campus sites where computers are made available to computerless students who can download whatever they want.

More than that, any member of any college faculty or administration, in the privacy of his or her own office, without anyone knowing, can download the 46 Questions without feeling shame or fear. Who will doubt that some of them will or that many of them might? We're talking about maybe tens of thousands of faculty and administrators on top of hundreds of thousands of students. The ads will be very small but very inexpensive, will run only once a week, and the word-of-mouth will be strong, tremendous even.

Until that afternoon I had had an image of the CODOH Website as a space station out in the cosmos someplace, hardly connected to the planet. Here was its first connection. One “cable” tying the station down to earth. Not to someplace out in the Arizona wastelands, but to the hearts and minds of the university population around the country. Running the ad in even one college newspaper will start the ball rolling. This time it won't be a matter of spending $800, $1,000, even $1,700 (as I paid to run an ad at the University of Georgia a couple years ago) to run a 4,000-word text for one day. The ad will cost maybe $10 per insertion, will be inserted once a week for four to six weeks, after which, having “seeded” the address of the Website on that campus, I will be able to move on to another. From tiny seeds great acorns do grow, to coin a phrase.

But that wasn't all. When the student or whomever mashes the right keys on his computer and arrives at the CODOH Website to read the 46 Questions, he will find all the other materials that will be on the site. Not to mention an advertisement offering for sale David Cole's videotape on Auschwitz, “David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper.” Gradually I'll add the other videos and audiotapes I've accumulated over the years. So there is a possibility that the CODOH Website will produce some income from sales, though I'm not counting on that at the beginning. Selling on the Web is a very different thing that offering free information on the Web. But I do believe we can develop new supporters for the Campus Internet Project. Supporters are everything in this kind of project. New supporters mean new energy, new contributions, new ideas – new everything.

That evening when I returned home I wrote the ad. It was the easiest ad writing I had ever done. There's not much to it.

To start with I would run the ad in Washington D.C., home of the Great (gas-chamber-less) Holocaust Museum. I would submit it to Georgetown University, University of Maryland (in College Park, a .D.C. suburb), and Howard University. I'd do it quickly then settle back and let some of the dust settle. I had a lot on my plate. I was just beginning to get the Website set up, I was trying to develop the offer on the David McCalden papers (which I suppose you have received by now), and I had a lot on my mind with regard to the money issue. I suppose I should mention sometime, so why not now, that last summer my wife was diagnosed as having cancer and we've been through two surgeries and she's on chemotherapy now and will do radiation after and then some more chemo and while she is doing well, even exceptionally well, it takes a certain amount of time out of our daily schedule and sometimes it can be rather distracting as well.

In any event, the day I began faxing student newspapers for up-to-date advertising rates was the day of the Million Man March led by the man with the million dollar smile, the Reverend Louis Farrakhan. No one responded. I imagined everyone on campus with their eyes cemented to the TV screen. I got caught up in it myself and spent a good part of the afternoon (in California) watching the affair. I was bored by most everyone who spoke, particularly Jesse Jackson who was all politics and complaint and accusation as usual, but I was fascinated by Farrakhan who intermittently preached a fine sermon on atonement and forgiveness, straight out of the Black Baptist tradition, with a not unpleasant veneer of Muslim reference. I thought he chanted wonderfully. His amateurish and un-worked-out musings on the influence of Masonry on the American racial stand-off undercut the effect of his preaching and put him back down in the Jackson league, though I don't believe even Jackson has gone on about the Masons. I still haven't heard from Howard University, the campus where a couple weeks earlier students had expressed such joy over the acquittal of Mr. Simpson. I think the last few weeks may have been too exciting for them to pay attention to business.

The first ads I submitted were to U. Maryland, Georgetown U. and Georgia State U. A supporter, hearing of the opening of this new phase of the Campus Project, offered to fund ads for U. Illinois at Chicago, U. Chicago, and Berkeley. U. Illinois at Chicago rejected the ad with an unsigned note. It has begun to appear in The Diamondback at U. of Maryland. I've received a tear sheet from the paper and the ad looks good, and I've gotten my first hate mail of the season. So here we go…

Do you want to participate in this new phase of the Campus Project? It’s easy, it’s inexpensive, and (incredibly) I believe it will be far more productive and lasting than anything we have done before. The 46-Questions comprise 15 single-spaced pages of information and questions David Cole worked up after two tours of the European “gas-chamber” sites. Much of this stuff is very new and some of it has never been discussed publicly.

But that isn’t the end of the matter. When the student, or professor or whomever, mashes (a word favored by East Texas natives like Lyndon Johnson) the right keys on his keyboard he will get not only the 46-Questions free, but will have access to the full texts of all the CODOH advertisements that have appeared in close to 100 college newspapers across the country, including the full text of “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate,” and “A Revisionist Challenge to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,” which have proven to be so provocative and have created so much media attention for revisionism. PLUS every individual who access the CODOH Website will have access to all the other materials that are going to be posted there, and they will be referred to the Websites managed by Greg Raven of the Institute of Historical Review and the “Zuendelsite” of Ernst Zuendel. And all this information will be there permanently, not for a costly one-day appearance in a newspaper page.

For some $10 per week (from about $5 to about $15 per classified ad) we can place the 46-Questions ad in any student newspaper — or paper(s) — you are personally interested in. If you have no personal preference, I’ll place the ad where I believe it will be the most productive. With regard to the number of times the ad should run in any one paper, I would suggest that it appear once a week for at least four to six weeks. The longer the better, of course, everything else being equal. However, limiting the time the ad runs in one paper will allow it to be run in another at no “additional” cost, and then another and so on, seeding the CODOH Website at each campus where it appears.

And at the risk of appearing vulgar, I would appreciate it if you would include something extra to help cover the usual expenses and the time involved. In the normal world they say time is money. In the revisionist world time is usually only time. Some day I may find regular work and won’t have to make these little observations, but until then….

Volunteers are contributing their time, without any hope of recompense, to help with the coding of texts and other technical help I need, coming forth to help with the CODOH Website. I’ve mentioned here a number of times that when it comes to the concepts of computer technology I’m a babe in the woods. Before Magaly went off to college she set up and took care of all my other electrically based equipment, the telephones, fax, photocopier etc. She would describe me to her friends as a “techno-weenie.” Now that she’s gone I don’t have to listen to such insults. Now a small group of polite volunteers have associated themselves with the project. The exotic (to me) work of coding manuscripts in the hyper text markup language (don’t ask) that is necessary for them to be posted on the Website is being taken care of comfortably. But that mundane (to them) work is only the tip of the iceberg. With ideas coming from as far away as France the concept for the site is broadening significantly.

The CODOH International Department will post revisionist materials in languages other than English. The United Kingdom will have it’s own site, though of course in our common tongue. The first important paper to be posted in a foreign language will be Carlo Mattogno’s critique, in Italian, of the Italian translation of Jean-Claude Pressac’s Les Crematories d Auschwitz: La Machinerie du meuertre de masse. Mattogno demonstrates here that Pressac’s work was not merely “translated,” but contained significant editorial changes which in effect further lowers Pressac’s guesstimate of the Auschwitz death toll. Of course, we will post the paper in English as well. We are able to do this only with the help and cooperation of Russ Granata, Mattogno’s associate and publisher in here in the U.S.

Other papers will be posted in French, Spanish, German, perhaps a few items in Portuguese and Danish, and with a little luck maybe even some work in Arabic.

It looks like one volunteer is going to handle the explosive subject of the links between the Holocaust story and Zionism and why that linkage is significant. I’m going to develop a history of the Campus Project, and will keep up with what begins to happen now with some kind of Internet Journal.