A Track Record Recalled by a Couple Friends

The first issue of Smith's Report came out in the Spring of 1990. Now Bradley is sending out the 200th issue. That is a pretty amazing achievement given the furious efforts of Believers to stifle discussion and thought on the Holocaust story. For over 23 years Smith's Report has been a small bright light of human curiosity and freedom.

In 1990 the legal findings of the Nuremberg Tribunal were the accepted history of World War II: We all knew that Germany had a plan to conquer the world; Germany started the War; it planned to exterminate all “inferior” people, it did kill millions of Jews, Roma, Slavs, and Gays. Thank God that we “stood up to Hitler.” That was the view of governments, media, and historians. After all, it had been proved at the Nuremberg Tribunal and was an established legal fact.

However, cracks in the facade appeared. People had questions.  Where was the secret Hitler Order for the extermination of millions of people? When was it issued? Why were all the organizational documents missing? Why was there no action by the British to stop the extermination? Were there really bone grinding machines that could obliterate millions of human bodies?  How could the diesel, steam or gas chambers really have worked?

Some people of a skeptical or scientific nature gave little weight to the pronouncements of the victorious governments.  When a story did not make sense, they refused to believe it. They thought for themselves and tried revise the story to comport with the Truth. These people are Revisionists. In fact, just about all parts of the Nuremberg Tribunal's findings have been revised, even by mainstream scholars. No “Hitler Order” has ever been found. It is admitted now that there could not have been steam or diesel chambers, the death toll of those camps were records were kept, Auschwitz and Majdanek has plummeted by millions. The revisions go on and on.

Given the huge revisions made by professional historians to the Nuremberg Stories, the hysterical response of Believers to Revisionists seems irrational.  Why this insistence on trick underground shower/gas chambers? But expressing doubt about “gas chambers” has been made a felony in many Western countries.  A conviction for “Denial” is punished more severely in the “democratic West” than selling an ounce of cocaine or heroin, for example, in Austria’s National Socialist Prohibition Law. Section 3g reads that “particularly dangerous suspects” can be punished with up to twenty years imprisonment.  Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year propagandizing for the Ugly Myth and “teaching” school children of the secret German conspiracy to exterminate all the Jews in the World. 

 An example of the Believer frenzy is a resolution adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 1. 2005 which “Rejects any denial of the Holocaust as an historical event, either in full or part.” One can only wonder how many of the honorable representatives could identify the Majdanek Camp or Tomas Kranz or Anna Tijsseling as they passed their resolution condemning Revisionism.  The passage of A/Res/60/7 stands as a sorry example of political stupidity.

The clearest example of politics over truth is the statement made by the United States Representative Alejandro Wolff that to “Deny events of the Holocaust is tantamount to approval of Genocide in all its forms.” I am left dumbfounded at the logical disconnect of Wolff's statement.  If I do not believe that there was a human soap factory at Danzig then I “approve of  Genocide in all its forms?”  Why? This is not some loon on a street corner babbling to the moon.  This is a statement of the august representative of the United States in support of spending $200,000,000 on making people believe in “the Holocaust.”

Anyway, amid this frenzy of politicians' resolutions, criminalization of discussion, the  squandering of hundreds of millions of public dollars, Bradley has been writing and publishing his Report encouraging free thought, good-faith discussions, and human inquiry. He is one of, perhaps, a dozen Revisionists in the World. He is a rare and valuable part of humanity and I am proud to be associated with him.

–David Merlin

Thirty-four years ago I received an advertisement for something to be called the Journal of Historical Review. Reading the revisionist version of history exposed me to a world of thoughts and ideas I might never have encountered otherwise. And in this world lived Bradley R. Smith.

I didn't know anybody in the revisionist “movement,” but from afar it seemed easiest to identify with Bradley. He had fought censorship in his Hollywood book store (Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer) on the principle of the thing. His approach to Holocaust revisionism seemed to be cut from that same cloth. He didn't claim to be a historian, but he could read and he could think. Bradley's principled stance was to stand athwart the traditional historiographies of the Holocaust, calmly urging people to stop and think. In high school we had been taught that this approach was called “semantics” and that we had luminaries such as S.I. Hiyakawa to thank for showing us the way. Part of Bradley’s appeal was that he seemed to be a fellow devotee of the discipline.

Over time, it turned out that Bradley was much more. He had all the mental faculties required to be a heretic—even given the much greater demands of being a Holocaust heretic—but he had something else as well: Persistence. Willis Carto used to have a quote from Calvin Coolidge on the wall of his office: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

As often as not, persistence is not flashy—even when teamed with determination. In Bradley’s case this means that what you see is what you get, as long as you are paying attention when you look. Bradley himself is often self-deprecating, and his unhurried approach can make you forget Jeff Cooper’s adage: “You can’t miss [your target] fast enough to win.” By 1988, though, he was held in such high regard that he was called as a witness for the defense in the “false news” trial of Ernst Zündel in Canada, and the ADL had started referring to him in terms usually reserved for Lucifer himself.

As time has gone on, the talented, educated geniuses at places such as the Institute for Historical Review have become the zombies of historical revisionism: They still move, but they’re not exactly alive, and they most certainly aren’t what they used to be. Bradley, though, is still plugging along.

In retrospect, it’s quite remarkable the number of things to which Bradley has turned his hand. First, there are periodicals such as Smith's Journal, Prima Facie, The Revisionist, Media Project (for the Institute for Historical Review), Revisionist Letters, Campus Update for Editors, and the current Smith’s Report; books such as Break His Bones, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist Part 1 (hard cover), Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist Part 1 (paperback — not really redux, even though it is billed as a second enlarged edition, as it has fewer pages and little-to-no-content in common with the first Part 1); websites for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) and other special projects; and his brilliant Campus Ad Project; to name a few.

How Bradley has kept it up all these years is anyone’s guess. That he does is something for which we all should be grateful.

Greg Raven – The Holocaust Historiography Project

Thanks guys. I have a couple anecdotes to tell about each of you, but will have to save them for Issue 201

Bradley