November - December 1996

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Elizabeth White, Editor of the Catholic University of America Tower, telephoned to say that the Tower will not run the advertisement I submitted. The ad reads "Holocaust Revisionism. Why are the Thought Police panicked? Read the evidence. Judge for yourself." I give the address for CODOHWeb, and my PO Box in Visalia.

   I ask Ms. White why she will not run the ad and she says because it's point of view is totally false. I ask if she has been to the site and she says no. I ask if she has read anything I have written and she says yes but when I ask what she can not recall. I ask if she can not say what is totally false, or maybe a little false, in what I have written, and she has not been to our Web site, how does she know that the information posted on CODOHWeb is totally false? She answers that she has attended staff meetings where she was told that all revisionist writings are totally false and she believes it.

   I try to suggest to Ms. White that it is not proper that a university journalist trust others to tell her what is totally false, or totally true for that matter, about any man's writing when the journalist hasn't read what the writer has written. She is adamant, however. She has been told that all revisionist writings are totally false, she believes it, and is going to act on her belief. She also says she does not have to discuss this matter with me, and she does not have to give any reason whatever for rejecting an advertisement.

   One sees the "true believer" syndrome in action here. Perhaps not entirely surprising at a Catholic university. If there is not a single professor on this Catholic campus who is willing to state publicly that intellectual freedom is important and that it depends entirely on open debate about controversial issues, including the controversy surrounding the gas chamber stories, why should the editor of a student newspaper take such a risk?

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

In its May '96 issue the University of Chicago Free Press runs a column written by Orloff Potemkin titled, "Censoring Irving Would Make the Nazis Proud." The column refers to how St. Martin's Press, under pressure from extremist Zionists, reneged on its contract to publish David Irving's Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Potemkin writes of Irving: "Even a fascist should be able to speak his mind in a democratic society" and that "censoring ideas we don't agree with is a start on that road [to fascism] ...."

   I am not made aware of Potemkin's column until September. The principled anti-censorship free press may be willing to run an advertisement for Irving's Goebbels. I work up an ad with a lead that includes the phrase "Censored In America" and submit it for publication. The ad is refused. I'm not told why. I suspect the anti-fascism ploy. I'm anti-fascist myself. The problem the anti-fascists and I have with one another is that I'm against intolerance.

John Karl Wilson, an editor at the Free Press, wants to interview me. He sends me his questions by e-mail. I don't have much interest in giving an interview to the person I suppose shares responsibility for suppressing the Goebbels ad and offers no explanation. I pass. When I see the articles by Wilson that appear in the November issue of the free press, I understand I did the right thing.

   One article is titled "David Irving: 'Historian' for Hitler." No surprises. Negative from start to finish, a typical WWII, anti-Fascist polemic. He calls Irving's Action Report Newsletter "vile." The couple I've read have been real classy. Wilson has a great deal of information about Irving in the article, some of which I have not read anywhere else (and find difficult to believe). He does not credit his sources for this information, pretending that he has done this research himself, which serves at the same time to hide the political bias of those sources. He ends by suggesting that the Jewish holocaust story may record "the most important event in history." He doesn't mention why that would be.