VICTORY IN BAJA! A Revisionist Dream Comes True

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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VICTORY IN BAJA!  A Revisionist Dream Comes True

An unprecedented step forward for the Holocaust revisionist movement. 
Two months ago if you had told me that I would be premiering a film 
at a major, mainstream film festival I'd have probably said you were 
losing it. And if you had told me that the film I'd be premiering 
would be a solidly revisionist movie in which people like Germar 
Rudolf and Ernst Zundel boldly present revisionist ideas and 
criticism of the Holocaust lobby, I might have even have said you 
were ready for the funny farm. And if you had told me I'd be 
hobnobbing with Oscar-nominated actors and international superstars, 
and that my revisionist film would receive enthusiastic applause and 
a truly positive audience reaction, I'd have called the funny farm 
myself. Yet everything I've described above is exactly what happened 
on June 7, 8, and 9 at the "Corto Creativo 07" film festival in Otay 
Mesa, an upscale suburb of Tijuana, the metropolis on the 
Mexico/California border.

It is difficult to express fully the importance of what happened at 
that festival, both in terms of barriers of the past being broken, 
and trails for the future being blazed. The Holocaust revisionist 
movement has taken a lot of serious hits the last few years, with 
some of our most important spokespeople being imprisoned, and many of 
us living in countries where we are afraid to speak up for fear of 
violence or government prosecution. What happened in Baja those three 
remarkable days in June is enough to not only help revitalize a 
fatigued, persecuted revisionist community, but also to take 
Holocaust revisionism to new heights.

"Corto Creativo" is an annual film festival sponsored by the 
Universidad de las Californias (UDC) in Baja. I do not want to 
discuss the specifics of how I came to be invited to participate in 
the festival, but suffice it to say I was invited - as a VIP. The 
Corto Creativo festival director is Jorge Camarillo, a professor of 
journalism and television production at UDC, and the coordinator of 
the B.A. program in Communication at UDC. He's also the 
vice-president of the "Binational Association of Schools of 
Communication of the Californias" (BINACOM), an educational 
association that brings together communication educators and students 
from the San Diego and Baja areas. BINACOM member schools include the 
Autonomous University of Baja California, the University of the 
Californias, Tijuana, Grossmont College, Southwestern College, San 
Diego City College, San Diego State University, the University of 
California San Diego, the University of San Diego, and the University 
of Sonora (Hermosillo, Mexico).

BINACOM is a sponsor of the Corto Creativo festival, and its 
president addresses the festival, which is also attended by Mexican 
federal, state, and municipal politicians. Each year the Corto 
Creativo festival attracts big-name Mexican and American actors, 
directors and producers. This year, participants included 
Oscar-nominated actress Adriana Barraza, who co-starred with Brad 
Pitt in the Oscar-nominated film "Babel," and international superstar 
Maria Conchita Alonso, the former Miss Venezuela who, apart from 
being a Grammy-nominated recording artist, has costarred in scores of 
Hollywood blockbusters alongside the likes of Nicholas Cage, Meryl 
Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Penn, Robin 
Williams—and the list goes on.  As you can see, this is a serious, 
mainstream film festival, sponsored by a well-known university, 
attended by Hollywood celebrities, and organized by a professional 
educator who is the vice-president of an educational institution 
composed of major universities in the U.S. and Mexico. Surely, this 
would be the last place you'd expect to find Bradley Smith.

And yet there I was, an invited guest at the festival - a VIP in fact 
- attending all the events, hobnobbing with celebrities, and 
premiering the first 32-minute cut of my revisionist film "The Great 
Taboo" (in Spanish, "El Gran Tabu"). I had been given the most 
prestigious time slot of the festival - the Friday evening screening. 
I had been allowed one hour forty-five minutes to give my talk, show 
my film, and afterward to hold a question and answer session. No one 
at the festival received more time.

The organizers were friendly and very cooperative. Whatever help I 
needed, I was given - even free Spanish-language subtitles for my 
film! For revisionists, it might seem too good to be true. But it 
wasn't. In fact, it turned out better than I could have imagined.

El Gran Tabu" featured Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and me. In the 
film, we discuss revisionist theory, free speech, Zionism and 9/11, 
and other hot-button topics freely and without constraint. This is a 
solidly revisionist film. No excuses, no apologies.

There were perhaps two hundred people in the audience when my film 
was screened. The reaction from the audience, made up predominantly 
of film students, teachers, and filmmakers (mostly from south of the 
border), was completely positive. This was a mainstream audience - no 
revisionists - and yet I might as well have been making a 
presentation at the Institute for Historical Review. The young people 
at this festival expressed only support and earnest curiosity. There 
was not one hostile gesture, not one expression of dismissal. I even 
had a lively on-camera exchange with Maria Conchita Alonso, during 
which she and I discussed the reaction of the professorial class in 
Venezuela to President Hugo Chavez's recent closing of an opposition 
TV station (this exchange related perfectly to my talk at the 
festival, which dealt with the response of the American professorial 
class to Holocaust revisionist ideas). The Holocaust lobby has always 
feared the day that revisionist ideas - uncensored and not filtered 
through a Holocaust lobby mouthpiece - finally reach a mainstream 
audience. And the Corto Creativo festival showed that the lobby's 
fears are almost certainly justified: When a mainstream audience has 
the opportunity to view a professionally produced film about 
revisionism, the reaction is overwhelmingly positive. A can of worms 
for the Holocaust Industry was opened in Baja last week. This could 
very well be the start of something big.

After I was finished with the screening, person after person came up 
to me with different networking ideas and connections at universities 
and other venues on both sides of the border. Others volunteered to 
help me with production, editing, or anything I needed. I was really 
very surprised by this, and rather moved. We're going to be taking 
this show on the road, and we are going to include in our road show 
the fastest growing market in North America - the Spanish-language 
market. This is a market heretofore untouched and un-exploited by 
revisionist activism...until now!

By the third day of the festival, some kind of "Holocaust education" 
organization that had been making a noise about my appearance at the 
festival created enough of a fuss that when the president of BINACOM, 
a professor who claimed to have lost relatives during the Holocaust, 
addressed the audience, she felt the need to devote her speech to 
denigrating revisionism, attacking me from the stage, slandering me 
as a racist and the representative of an "ideology" of hate. But she 
did not address one word from the talk I had delivered, and not one 
word from the film. As I told her during her Q&A, she was the perfect 
example of the behavior of the American professorial class that I had 
addressed in my speech. She made my case. She would not address any 
revisionist text, no matter how simple. She would only attack and 
slander the individual who wrote it (I have this entire exchange on 
film).

And then I experienced something, again, that I had not expected. The 
young people in the audience stood with me, and openly challenged the 
professor's irrational denunciation of my presence at the festival. 
How many times have revisionists been a lone voice surrounded by a 
hostile crowd? And yet there I was, with the full support of a young, 
mainstream audience, and it was the anti-revisionist professor who 
was the lone voice.

These were three days I will remember for a long time. And three days 
that the Holocaust Industry may soon come to remember with despair. 
Because something new was demonstrated at this festival: Give 
revisionists access to an objective, mainstream audience, and the 
falsehoods of the Holocaust lobby won't stand against the facts of 
revisionism and the argument for intellectual freedom.

And, thanks to this conference, I'm going to have many more 
opportunities like this, in a market where groups like the ADL have 
very little, almost no, pull at all. This is the beginning. The 
beginning of something that could be very big for us. Initial 
preparations are already underway for the next screening of "El Gran 
Tabu," which is currently being updated to include footage from the 
Corto Creativo festival. Last December, when I spoke at the Tehran 
Holocaust conference, I felt as though I were part of something 
unique and groundbreaking. I was, but I am more enthusiastic about 
what has happened here at the Corto Creativo 07. I made connections 
here with people with whom I can stay connected because they are 
"local," not thousands of miles away on another continent. And 
because I can really stay connected with these new connections, the 
opportunities to take this work on the road have suddenly blossomed 
in a dozen different directions.

There will be more to say very soon but, for now, I'll leave you with 
this: The Corto Creativo festival in 2007 demonstrated that what 
we've all been working toward these many years is fully attainable. 
I'll keep you informed of what's coming next.