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A San Francisco Examiner…

By Bradley R. Smith ∙ May 1, 1995

Last updated on

A San Francisco Examiner reporter called the day after the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He wanted a little inside information on the “militias.” Of course I would be one of the first people in America to ask. Anyone would think so. After all, I don’t believe the gas chamber stories. When the reporter discovered I don’t know anything whatever about the militias he asked me if there was something I would like to say about them. I convinced him that it would be immodest of me to chat up a reporter on a subject I am entirely ignorant of.

Afterwards it struck me that that must be the way many reporters approach “survivors.” The survivor doesn’t have to know anything real; the reporter isn't even particularly looking for something real. Anything will do, anything whatever—any old memory, any old opinion—so long as it's lurid and fits into the editorial guidelines of the company he works for.

Maybe I missed a good tiling here. If I’d have given one interview about the militias to the Examiner, other reporters from other papers would have called to get their own story about the militias—from a holocaust revisionist. What fun.

  • Bradley R. Smith

    Bradley R. Smith was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1930. At 18 he joined the army and in 1951 served with the infantry in Korea where he was twice wounded. After three decades of a variety of professional activities, it suddenly hit him: In 1979 he read a leaflet by Professor Robert Faurisson, "The Problem of the Gas Chambers." Then, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century did it for him. He understood from the beginning that he would address the censorship, the suppression of independent thought, the taboo against publishing and debating revisionist arguments—not the arguments themselves. That has remained his position. In 1989, Smith founded Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) dedicated to defending free speech and free inquiry into the Holocaust question. He handed over CODOH's helm in late 2014. He passed away on his 86th birthday, February 18, 2016. Read a series of obituaries here.

Bibliographic information about this document: Smith's Report, no. 23, May 1995, pp. 4f.
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a

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