Notebook

You may have noticed that this issue of Smith's Report is late. If I were a sober, practical professional I wouldn’t let on why. But mine is an unfailingly amateur personality so I’m going to spill the beans. I’m over my head in expenses and debt and I’m moving to Rosarito—as in Mexico—a beach town 20 miles south of the border in Baja California. We have been thinking about it for 10 years. By the time you have this in your hands we’ll be there. I think it’s going to prove to be a blessing.

I’ll have a house to live in that’s rent-free, a relatively spacious office to work in after working for nine years in our dining room and garage, a USPO mail box in San Ysidro on the U.S. side of the border, and a cross-border postal delivery service every 24 hours. I'll have two telephone lines into the house and a Stateside telephone answering service. My expenses will drop (very) significantly, if my calculations are anywhere at all in the ball park, so I will go no further into debt, and I’ll be able to spend less time juggling five and ten dollars from one place to another and more time on the work I have before me.

Every month for close to three years I have gone deeper into debt.

It’s been a real bother. It’s nicely ironic that soon after I lost my two major supporters and began building my debt, I was able to establish CODOHWeb on the Internet, reinvigorate the Campus Project, and upgrade Smith's Report to where it compares with any revisionist publication of its kind that has ever appeared in print, and excels most.

Revisionism isn’t a business. I have no salary and no regular income. I knew it wasn’t a business before I got into it but I got into it anyway. I know of only three people in the world who make a living at revisionism—and they’re on notice. If anyone out there knows how to make revisionism a business, I’m all ears.

Putting aside my personal financial mess, the good news is that it will have no effect whatever on CODOHWeb. Our Internet server will remain in Orange County where it is now. It doesn’t matter where I live. Richard Widmann and David Thomas will continue to do the lion’s share of the work on the site, and CODOHWeb will continue to grow, as we noted in SR44, as an encyclopedic source of new revisionist research and scholarship. I could be shot by a Mexican border agent on my way to Rosarito and CODOHWeb, structured as it is, would just keep sailing on through the cosmos in the best of hands.

Smith’s Report will not be affected by the move. SR is the instrument I use to inform you of what I am doing (together with a growing number of volunteers) to encourage open debate on the Holocaust controversy. I have corralled top editorial help for SR, and none of these individuals have ever lived here in Visaila or any other place where we could meet face to face. With regard to the work it doesn’t make any difference whatever to any of us that I am going to be in Mexico. We are working now with people all over the globe. It costs next to nothing to communicate using e-mail. It costs next to nothing to produce SR using e-mail. It’s a miracle of modem technology. Five years ago it would have been impossible for me to operate in this manner. Five years ago there was no Internet “Web” to speak of. Five years ago I would have been a dead duck.

The Campus Project will not be affected by my being in Mexico. I’ll be a half-hour from the border. It's a 45-minute drive from Rosarito to San Diego. I can manage the Project using e-mail, fax and the postal service next academic year as I did last and the years before that. I can run the Project& we’ll have to see if I can raise the money to run it well. But—and my apologies—I am going to have to refuse to go any further into debt.

The first week in May I'm understood I had to change the course my expenses were taking. I could either decide to move or I could wait and hope for the best. If the best happened I could stay where I am, but if something less happened we, all of us, would be out on the street, literally, maybe as early as September. It was suddenly an easy decision to make. When you have no choice, it’s easy. When you have a choice you can go back and forth. Once you know there’s no choice you do what’s necessary.

There’s always a catastrophe looming in the background when you're in revisionism, unless you are not very much in it. People used to ask me why I got into revisionism in the first place. I didn’t know why I got into it. I used to say it was just poor judgement, I thought I had decided to become a professional writer but then, in 1979, I read Robert Faurisson’s article for Le Monde, “Auschwitz: The Problem of the Gas Chambers.” It had taken me years to come to the decision to become a professional writer, but it took only 20 minutes to become a revisionist. Now, as people discover that once again I seem to be in extremis, I am being asked why I don’t get out of revisionism. I don’t know that either.

I don't know why I got in, don’t know why I’m not getting out. It doesn’t even cross my mind to get out. In 18 years it would appear I haven’t learned anything.

I’ve learned that revisionism is somehow worth the bother to me. Somehow. I did it yesterday, I'm doing it today, I expect to do it tomorrow. My sense of things, still, is that revisionism is at the pivot point of the intellectual life of Western culture, and that it will remain so on into the next millennium My immediate concern is that I get rid of the useless burdens that interfere with my effectiveness as a writer, obstruct my imagination, and undermine what should be a fun-filled life.