Notebook

Three young men, students at colleges in Ohio and Pennsylvania, drove down to Baja the other day to say hello. All have done revisionist work on their campuses; one while he edited his campus newspaper. They wanted to pass a couple days overdosing on revisionism. A good time was had by all.

It was interesting to discover who and what they were most curious about, other than their host. David Cole and Michael Hoffman topped the list, followed by Ingrid Rimland and Ernst Zuendel. In short, North Americans. They are surprisingly sophisticated about revisionist literature generally, and are familiar with the work of all the revisionist scholars here and in Europe.

They use the Cole video on Auschwitz regularly to get the attention and interest of other students, and they do so openly. They don’t attempt to speak in public forums, but work among their respective student bodies with small groups, oftentimes one on one.

They report that a good part of their campus populations are aware of their revisionist work. While none of the three tries to force a public debate on the issues, they go pretty well straight ahead with their recruiting work in a casual and reasonably open manner.

I took advantage of their visit to get out of the house and show them around north Baja both days. At the house we made time to watch three videos It surprised me to find that they most wanted to watch 48 Hours—The Lost Footage first.

This is the footage showing the crew from Dan Rather’s 48 Hours interviewing me in Visalia in 1992, where I had turned one comer of our family room into an office space.

I hadn’t watched the video in years. It was interesting to be reminded how out of it the 48 Hours reporter, Rita Braver, was at the time of the interview. She didn’t have the least idea what the controversy over revisionism is all about, had no idea about the issues of intellectual freedom involved with it, and spent all her time trying to corner me into revealing my hidden agenda as an antisemitic and racialist propagandist. The video is amateurish as a video production, but the back and forth adds up to a pretty damning story. Anyone interested in the problems of trying to mainstream revisionism would enjoy seeing it.

Another of the videos we watched was the Jerry Williams Show that I did about the same time.. I had arranged for Fred Leuchter to guest with me, and Williams had invited a spokesman from the Jewish Defense League.

He was a big, tough character who came to be known around here as Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto. When I didn’t behave the way Bluto wanted me to he would challenge me to meet him in the alley behind the studio. Williams claimed on air to be a “scholar” of World War II and assured his audience that the human soap stories were true. I had forgotten just how antagonistic he was on air, and how committed he was to exterminationist theory.

Watching these two videos caused me to reflect on two matters. One: how long it has been since I have done television and radio, and two: why I quit doing them. I had come to a dead end with the medium. I had done well over 200 radio interviews, a dozen on television, and it was necessary to say the same thing (have the same argument) with one host after another without ever having the time to educate any of them. When you do radio, it’s in and out of town (on the air), so it comes down to who has the best sound bites and sometimes who can yell the loudest. I got bored with it.

Eight years ago, when the Campus Project began to make real inroads into the academic community, I decided it was more important to persevere on campus than with radio. And I was tired of the Blutos, the Rita Bravers and Jerry Williams clones. I would try to get the attention of students, with the idea that I would try to help them “grow into” revisionism and the issue of intellectual freedom, which is what it represents in the cultural context of our time.

I think I made the right decision. It was tough going. Then in 1995 we went on the Internet with CODOHWeb. It was at that time that revisionism was invested with a new energy, new resources, new audiences, new opportunities on every side, internationally as well as on American campuses. The rise of revisionism in the Islamic world (not least through the availability of French Muslim Roger Garaudy’s Founding Myths of Israeli Politics on CODOHWeb) has been just one aspect of revisionism’s renewed vitality.

For all the progress we’ve been making, there remains in my mind’s eye the incomplete vision of linking the Campus Project in all its variety, and CODOHWeb with its tremendous world-wide reach, with all the diverse establishment and alternative media available to us. It’s possible that I have been missing a single unifying instrument. It’s more than just possible, if I can remain a little elusive here, that this is about to change.

[If you would like to have a behind the scenes look at how establishment network television pushes to fill their agenda when they interview revisionists (or those, I suppose, representing any other “radical ” viewpoint), you'll be interested in watching this homebrewed view (our 16-year old daughter, Magaly, was our—rather restless—camera woman) of Dan Rather's Rita Braver on 48 Hours: The Lost Footage. (See ad, pg. 7)]