The Campus Project

Early in the month I signed up temporarily with America On Line (AOL) so I could access the Internet (the “Net”) and browse around through the World Wide Web (the “Web”), which is where I will set up the permanent CODOH Website. There were installation problems I could not solve so I had to call in a consultant. He discovered my modem, the instrument which connects my computer with the Internet, was defective and had to be replaced.

After several days delays I was finally set. The first time I accessed the Net I went to the “newsgroups” and punched up “alt.revisionism.” This is the discussion group I participated in last year for a couple months. It's an absolutely free forum for revisionism. The only one in the world. It's a revelation.

At the same time, the “discussion” for the most part is so vulgar and so lacking in good will that nearly all reasonable people from every political stripe must turn up their noses at it. The exterminationists who post there are largely rabid “anti-fascists,” as if they are reliving the struggles of long-dead red grandfathers and great-grandfathers, while revisionist theory is compromised by “revisionists” whose principle agendas appear to be “racist” and “anti-Jewish.”

Nearly every revisionist who was participating in the group last year has quit it. A handful of brave souls, names that are new to me, are disputing with a large number of exterminationists, including the core group that for all intents and purposes dominated and manipulated the discussion last year. The discussion is even more vulgar this year than it was last, if that's possible. I don't want to dismiss what goes on there as being without any value whatever, but at the moment I don't see how it would benefit the Campus Project by my getting involved with it.

Next, I decided to call up Greg Raven's Website [a predecessor of the IHR website, now at www.ihr.org; ed.], which is dedicated to posting information relating to the Institute for Historical Review and its publications. Where would I find it? All I knew was that it was out there in the cosmos someplace, a zillion miles from nowhere. How long would it take to make the connection? I had the “address,” a series of letters and numbers. I punched them in on my keyboard and in about ten seconds I saw Greg Raven's “home page” (a book has a cover, a Website has a home page). It was exciting to see Raven's art work appear on the screen. It was like a little miracle.

I spent the next week going from one place on the Internet to another, from one Website to the next. The Websites were organized pretty much as I had imagined them. Each site has a number of categories set up in “outline” form, just like we were taught to outline an English or history paper in junior high school, then each category is further outlined so that the browser can gain easy access to all the information contained on the site.

After only a couple sessions on the Web I found a directory titled Campus Newspapers broken down into wire services, dailies, weeklies, prototypes and other college journalism resources. Out of the blue, an on-line supporter e-mailed me a seven-and-one-half-page list of some 350 e-mail addresses for, among others, daily newspapers, weekly and alternative newspapers, college newspapers, magazines, news/media services and press associations and radio and television stations.

This kind of information, together with the ability to mail it electronically by smashing a few keys at my computer, will be invaluable when the time comes to work with the print press and the rest of the media, both on and off campus. And the cost of doing so will be pennies on the dollar compared to using the postal service.

In addition to the above, when I announced my presence on-line, individuals from around the country, some with real technical and/or editorial expertise, began to come forward with offers to help. I have received ideas that hadn't occurred to me. One editorial associate is beginning to work up what he will call a Thought Crimes Archive [see now our library category (No) Freedom of Expression; ed.]. What concept could be more appropriate for CODOH to work with, in conjunction with media and the universities, than the tracking and archiving of how revisionists and revisionist theory are attacked, persecuted and prosecuted for committing thought crimes?

It would be one thing to publish such an archive and distribute it to the readers of Smith's Report. It is a matter of another order to create such an archive and post it to a permanent Website where it will be available to (literally) millions of computer literate individuals all over the globe, permanently—including every student newspaper that is on-line, and most every important university is on-line, everywhere in the world.

With a little help from my friends, I expect to have a revisionist site on the World Wide Web by the middle of September.