Notebook

This issue of Smith’s Report is the fiftieth I’ve published since the first one in the spring of 1990. Fully a third of those issues have appeared in the last two years.

I got involved in promoting Holocaust revisionism in July, 1984, just after the arson attack that burned the Institute for Historical Review to the ground. Not only was I stunned by the attack, I was outraged at the disinterest shown by the Los Angeles press in the attempted destruction of a publisher that offered real dissent on an issue I had become convinced stood in bad need of it.

Offering my services to the IHR, I began by editing a newsletter called Prima Facie (“on the face of it”) that sought to alert its target audience of four thousand reporters and editors to the errors of fact about the Holocaust story that they were routinely repeating, and to the corruption implicit in their suppression of the growing intellectual challenge from revisionist theory.

When journalists showed themselves to be unmoved—even by my exposes of the most grotesque survivors’ tales and calumnies—I decided to take the case for Holocaust revisionism, and the case for hearing and debating that case openly and freely, to the American public over the airwaves. As chief of IHR’s Media Project, I did over 300 interviews on radio and television with talk show hosts and reporters. Out of the Media Project and its confrontations with every variety of American, coast to coast, including a preponderance of Holocaust survivors or GI liberators, real and imagined, there grew within me a determination to take Holocaust revisionism to the audience with the intellectual skills, the leisure for contemplation, and the commitment to freedom of thought that would, most likely, in the end, grant it a hearing—academia. So I began to work out the Campus Project.

This and the forty-nine previous issues of Smith's Report plot much of that project, as well as the rise of CODOHWeb, Holocaust revisionism’s most massive presence on the World Wide Web, and numerous other doings of note by me, or my associates, or other revisionists, or by our adversaries in the Holocaust lobby. What these issues—which make up a unique archive on Holocaust revisionist outreach in the 1990’s—don’t recount is how, slowly at first, but with increasing urgency, you. the subscribers to Smith's Report, have become central to my work.

From the beginning, it was my instinct that revisionism needed to be taken outside the small circle of the convinced and the converted, taken to the wider American public, the great middle, through targeted mailing to the newspapers they read, appearances on the radio and television programs they watch and listen to, by creating a presence at the colleges and universities where their kids live and study, and finally by constructing a revisionist archive on the World Wide Web that bypasses the intellectuals as a class and speaks directly to Americans and to people around the globe.

Smith’s Report began as an occasional letter to a few friends and contributors in 1990, when I was doing the Media Project for IHR. During the next five years, I became fully committed to the Campus Project, funding my work with a monthly stipend from IHR and the contributions of one major benefactor.

Then, in early 1995, I lost the support of the IHR. Shortly after that my chief benefactor was forced to severely limit her support. It made my head spin. Revisionism is not a lucrative profession (to put it calmly) in the best of times. This was the worst of times (you can read all about it in SR 22). There was a bright side to these catastrophic events: for the first time (I feel uncomfortable saving it, but I suppose it’s the truth), I was compelled to get serious about Smith’s Report, which for five years I had published pretty much when I was in the mood.

If I was going to continue to be able to do revisionism I would have to put this newsletter on a regular, predictable basis, so that you could hear from me and I could hear from many of you on a monthly basis. It also meant my addressing the core of my subscribers and supporters with the same dogged persistence with which I have addressed mainstream journalists, media producers, college editors and the like over the past fifteen years.

As you and other patient subscribers know, I’m still wrestling with this one. But with support from you and so many other subscribers. I’ve accomplished a good deal. The rewards have been many, far beyond the basic support that you and others have provided (a support without which neither the Campus Project nor CODOHWeb could exist).

You’ve provided me with the intellectual and moral support which I have not always, or to put it more precisely, almost never received from media and particularly from academics. You’ve provided criticism I can actually use. And from the ranks of SR subscribers whom I first learned of only as names on a mailing list, have stepped forward friends, advisors, and even SR and CODOWeb editors. This has happened many times, and it is happening now more than ever. With your attentive criticism and support, we’ve been able to raise Smith’s Report to a level at which it is now read with attention and respect by the leading revisionist scholars in America and abroad. We have a long way to go to make and win the case for revisionism around the world. I understand that.

But we’ve come a long way—and for that, I, and all the people who depend on CODOH and CODOHWeb here and abroad, owe you our heartfelt thanks. You can own a complete archive of all the first 50 Smith’s Reports for $49—some 300,000 words. See the enclosed information. This is (necessarily) a one-time offer. If you already have some of the recent issues, you can give the duplicate issues to a person you believe might be interested in them.