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.
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ April 1, 1998
At Swarthmore College the beat goes on (thanks, Sonny). The liberal paper on campus, The L-Word, devotes most of its issue this month to the controversy precipitated by the distribution on campus of our leaflet The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate. First there was the shock of the leaflet itself. Then The Phoenix,…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1998
It’s been a nice month. Four storms passed through. My office is on the second floor and I can walk out on the terraza and see in three directions. To the west we are the fourth house from the end of the street. Beyond a concrete block wall are fields a quarter mile across and…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1998
As this issue of Smith’s Report was being readied for press, we received the news from Paris that Roger Garaudy was convicted on February 27 of violating France’s law against contesting the Holocaust story. The 83-year-old Frenchman, who had to contend with legal attacks from ten different Jewish associations as well as with the state…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1998
SR reader Manfred Roeder gets around: last September he was badly beaten by leftist thugs while demonstrating against a traveling exhibition that seeks to smear Germany’s WWII Wehrmacht with “Holocaust” calumnies long reserved for the SS. Despite severe cuts, a concussion, and a broken finger, Roeder was back in the streets agitating against the defamatory…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1998
In recent weeks and months. Holocaust museums and proposed Holocaust museums have encountered unprecedented criticism and reversals, in the United States, in Canada, and in Germany. While the critics have neither expressed nor been motivated by full-throttle Holocaust revisionism, they have nevertheless objections that are implicitly revisionist. Take the fall of Walter Reich, who was…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ March 1, 1998
Last summer when we arrived in Baja I began thinking about what problems might come up because of my work with revisionism, who should know what my work is, how much they should know, was it going to be different here than it was in the States, and so on. One day my daughter Paloma…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 1, 1998
When we moved from Visalia to Baja Mexico last summer, I mentioned that everyone came, Irene and me, Paloma, Grandma, the birds, our dog Katy, and Pete the cat. Several people mentioned they would like to see a photo of Pete. No one mentioned Grandma or Katy. So here’s Pete. The kid? Paloma, just before…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 1, 1998
The Last Ditch (TLD) is the name of a radical libertarian journal of which Joe Sobran once commented, “If this government cared about ideas, it would crack down on The Last Ditch. It could be called The Joy of Thinking.” In that regard, TLD has recently published a number of very thoughtful articles having to…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 1, 1998
To date, CODOH has influenced campuses across America chiefly from the outside—by placing advertisements in college newspapers. That’s beginning to change, however, as university students—with the help of CODOH and other revisionist outfits—start to think for themselves, and then to act on their convictions. During the past year Washington State University senior Lawrence Pauling has…
By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 1, 1998
A tear sheet from the Georgia State Signal informs me that our ad drawing attention to the fake gas chamber door at the USHMM had begun its once-a-week run. Regina Roberts of the Atlanta Journal Constitution calls my upstairs office here in Baja. Outside a wild storm is raging. The electricity goes off, comes on,…
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