Notebook

In the newsletter business it’s not always good news. If it were, it wouldn’t be a newsletter, it would be something else, a personal puff sheet, a glad rag of some sort. We’re winning the war, as they say—and I’m perfectly confident of that—but along the way I get beaten here, I get beaten there. Nothing big. But it can be nettlesome.

Last week The Hornet at California State University (Sacramento) accepted my ad. The Hornet was savaged badly a few years ago for running a CODOH advertisement and has refused to run anything from us since—until last week. I wanted very much to be at CSU Sacramento. It’s right under the noses of the California State Legislature. The heart of California politics. This is the legislature that in 1986 gave the Simon Wiesenthal Center $5,000,000 to help run its Museum of Tolerance.

According to the Philanthropic Advisory Service, the income of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1995 was $20,133,860. Its assets totaled $64,078,711. The Chief Executive Officer of the SWC, Rabbi Marvin Hier, earns $254,855 per annum, not counting perks.

Rabbi Hier and I are going head to head—have been for years. He’s set up a special desk at the SWC to “handle” the Campus Project. I suppose I’m a little envious of the rabbi. I could use $64 million in assets myself. I could use considerably less to very good effect. It makes my imagination water (there’s a peculiar image) to imagine how it would be for the Campus Project—for revisionism—if I had a measly million bucks to spend in any given year. Or half a million. A quarter of one million. There’d be all hell to pay, I can tell you that.

Running my ad at CSU Sacramento, just being there, two little inches of display space week in and week out, would make me a happy camper. That’s what a simple fellow I am. What’s more, I have a supporter for the ad in The Hornet. I could stay there forever, a thorn in the side of this Holocaust Lobby Legislature, a thorn in the side of the SWC, which would do whatever they could to block publication of the ad.

Last Saturday my check to The Hornet was returned with a note saying the editorial board had changed its mind. The rabbis (of whatever faith) had got to the editors or got to someone who had gotten to the editors. They’d beaten me again at CSU-Sacramento. This one ad by itself wasn’t going to change the world one way or another, but it gave me pause.

Sometimes I ask myself if I am not too old to be horsing around with student newspapers and student journalists. I’m old enough to be a grandfather to these kids. I’m depending on 20-year-olds to help me in my struggle to win a great contest against great odds. But then these are the same 20-year-olds the professors and the SWC and the ADL and the rest of them are dependent upon to win the contest for them!

The universities are full of old guys trying to tell students what to think about the Holocaust story. I’m here to tell students they can run their own intellectual lives on this or any other subject. They don’t need a bunch of pinched-faced old farts telling them what to think and how to think and when to think it. The students need me. They don’t know it. But I’m the one who will help free them from the chains their professors have enveloped them with on this issue. And in turn, it will be the students—in the end it won’t be me— who will play a major role in blowing down the Holocaust house of cards.

Meanwhile, the Campus Project is becoming a subject for reflection in university classes in communications. There are professorial lectures, class discussions, papers assigned. The subject of these discussions and papers is not the rights and wrongs of revisionist theory, but whether campus papers are professionally or ethically required to publish our ads.

Today, the St. John’s University (New York) paper interviewed me in March. I have a long list of questions to reply to from a Colorado academic who is writing a book on the use of the Internet by radical groups, and another by a student at Arizona State. A California communications instructor expects to interview me in person this spring for his book.

In each case there is a presumption that revisionism is part of a “movement.” It’s unclear what this movement is supposed to be, but I am seen to be part of it. This is a movement, however, that has no leader, no followers, no party and no platform. I’m proud to be part of it.

But what kind of movement is that?

I used to tell these people that revisionism has no politics, but of course it does. It’s the politics of intellectual freedom, open debate, a free press. Those are political ideas. American political ideas. What makes a politics of intellectual freedom so dangerous is that it promises the same thing to everyone—to those who believe and to those who don’t believe—whatever.

Revisionism is a “politics” that’s made to order for students. It’s made to order for me—for you and me—to take to them.