The Campus Project

In January I received an email message from a Pierce College (Tacoma WA) student who had found the CODOH Website on the Internet. He wanted to help. I submitted an ad announcing that 46 Unanswered Questions About the World War II Gas Chambers are available free on the Internet to the Pierce College Pioneer. The ad was rejected. Pierce students passed out our leaflet, The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate. A Pierce journalism instructor ran an opinion piece in The Pioneer denouncing revisionism and revisionists but did not address any of the 46 Unanswered Questions. Another Pierce student donated a copy of our Auschwitz video, David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, to the Pierce Library, where it was accepted. I sent copies of Carlos Porter’s The Holocaust: Made in Russia to other students at Pierce, one of whom is donating it to the library.

News travels fast. A student at University of Puget Sound (UPS) contacted me by email and offered to help on his campus. I submitted the 46 Questions ad to the UPS Trail, which was refused. The UPS student duplicated copies of Cole’s Auschwitz video and gave them to students so they could watch it in their rooms with others. He gave a copy of the video to the UPS library where, as of this writing it is be cataloged and processed. Others passed out The Holocaust Controversy pamphlet. One student sent the Auschwitz video to UPS history professor Theodore Taranovski, who now uses it to “explain” how revisionists work.

When Dr. Edward Linenthal, a Professor of Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, spoke at U. Puget Sound on “Representing War and Holocaust in American Culture: The Politics of Memory,” UPS Trail (29 February) reported in a front page story that the talk turned into an “open forum for debate, when three college-age males claimed that the Jewish Holocaust is blown out of proportion.” The Trail story reports one student at the lecture felt that “what those students had to say turned a brilliant lecture into the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen on campus.” After the lecture and the “open forum,” the three students passed out pamphlets saying that “no execution gas chambers existed in any camp in Europe which was under German control…” Sounds familiar. One of the students who questioned Professor Linenthal went so far, the Trail reports, as to wear a T-shirt printed with the words “Free Speech.”

This affair with campuses in Washington state has been something of an eye-opener for me. Because of my presence on the Internet I’m going to be contacted by many more students than I have been in the past. Some will be eager to do activist work. I was reminded very quickly that students on the ground can do more on their campuses than I can. They’re not support for me. I’m support for them. I suppose it’s mutual.