CAMPUS
PROJECT

Detractors of Pamphlet Don't Offer Concrete Evidence, Says Revisionist Bradley R. Smith

The Phoenix reports that President Bloom ("himself Jewish") states that I wrote my article "The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate" to "express [my] personal prejudices," and that I have an "anti-Semitic agenda," a small-minded ad hominum assault that I dismiss out of hand. It's the kind of thing you overhear in your local butcher shop.

President Bloom apparently did not address any specific statement or language in the text of my article, but was content to slander me. In this he is following the precedent set by his academic peers, together with special-interest pressure groups such as the two mentioned in the Phoenix article: The Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'Rith (ADL), and its campus front, Hillel.

College presidents and their professors have had six years to correct the errors of fact contained in my article (it was first published in the Daily Northwestern in 1991) but have failed to do it. Why? Because if an error of fact is discovered in the article I'll correct it. What then? The professors and their presidents will be left with what's left over. What are they going to do with all the statements of "revisionist" fact that are left over?

The "Holocaust" is not one story but a vast collection of documents, testimony, and yarns. Some of it's true and some of it isn't. How ordinary! Revisionist theory addresses those documents and outs those that can be shown to be fabrications. It addresses eyewitness testimony and outs that which can be shown to mere invention, or worse. If President Bloom's professors were doing it, I wouldn't have to.

The use of slander by those in authority against those of us who doubt what they say we must believe is the response of the petty tyrant. Academics, pledging their allegiance to orthodoxy rather than to open debate, have become mere patriots of the Holocaust, the last refuge on campus for the intellectual scoundrel. Rather than trusting themselves to the processes of free inquiry, they turn to supermarket tabloid psychologizing to convince students to avoid the texts that their professors themselves vilify-for reasons the professors are not called upon to reveal.

Meanwhile, revisionist theory is metastasizing (I love giving the profs a straight line) all over the place. When I opened my website on the Internet two years ago we were getting forty and fifty hits a day. Now, every 24 hours, close to 2000 revisionist documents are accessed on our site alone. Slander is a wonderfully effective tool in the hands of our college presidents (I know!), but in a free society an honest search for truth is even more potent.

When students become aware that their professors and their professors' leaders are evading the specific language of the text they condemn, thus replacing education with indoctrination, I think they will be a little disappointed with the intellectual level of the college they are attending. Bradley R. Smith is director of CODOHWeb. He can be reached at www.codoh.com .