Fragments

*** Smith’s Report #2. November, 1990. Visalia, California:

“This report informs you of what I am doing personally to promote an open debate on the Holocaust story. It does not attempt to monitor the revisionist movement.”

That was 25 years ago. That’s the way it’s been all this time. What I am doing personally to open up the story. I did not try to monitor the revisionist movement. In the end, what has come of it? CODOH itself. There is nothing anywhere in the world to compare with our immense library of documents—all of them online and accessible to everyone. The CODOH Forum, the premier revisionist debate forum in the world. Inconvenient History, a Quarterly Journal, which has effectively replaced The Journal of Historical Review, which once represented the entire revisionist movement. And then there are 216 issues of Smith’s Report. It all started with a six-pager in November 1990.

Now SR has a new publisher and a new approach to our interests. What I publish here will continue to be what I do, a substantial part of it subjective, “my own story” if you will. That’s the way I began SR, and that’s the way it’s been for 25 years. Bear with me. I have my own story to tell. What’s left of it. Why do I want to tell it? I have never known. I don’t know now. I probably never will know.

*** At the same time, I continue to work online to reach out to the American public on and off the university campus. I can’t do it alone. My two primary helpers, Tony and Ricardo, both live here in Mexico. A lot of stuff is getting done online that is difficult, impossible, to keep up with here. For example, SR#215 was distributed to Harvard where we have an ongoing campus project focused on Prof. Steven Pinker. The lead article in Smith’s Report #215, “Being Jewish: Remembering the Holocaust” by Jett Rucker, was sent to 4,500 Harvard academics and student orgs. It also went to a 4,000-person list at USC including the Stephen Spielberg bunch, to Free Speech orgs nationwide, to Hillel, and to Muslim student orgs at universities in the US. At the same time, all these sends included a link to the entire archive of Smith’s Report now published on CODOH.

SR#215 was posted on our Codoh Founder’s blog and our dedicated website to our campus project: A Light on Camps Now. Anyone who is subscribed to our Constant Contact list got a copy of SR #215, and our CODOH team announced SR #215 on CODOH’s Recent News. We did the same on Facebook where we have 4,200 followers on Smith’s personal account and another 2,000 followers on our CODOH Facebook page.

Among other posts and promotions we announced the new video now available for purchase online, the Treblinka Documentary by Eric Hunt, now ready for an international audience with subtitles in German, Spanish, and Portuguese. We posted that on Smith’s Facebook personal page and on CODOH Facebook page, a total potential outreach to 6,200 people.

Over the past days we have sent David Merlin’s article on the new Deborah Lipstadt Hollywood movie to some 24,000 university email addresses in Wisconsin, Virginia, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Massachusetts. Now we have a program where we can collect the emails of those who open the document or click on any of the links on our page. This is always a small percentage, but now we can create another focused mailing list of those who express some interest in the material.

We distributed the new autumn issue of Inconvenient History to Free Speech organizations nationwide, to our Muslim lists, to Hillel, and to various campuses as well as posting it on the Founder’s blog and sending the announcement via Constant Contact.

This is a brief summary of the outreach program that goes on and will go on month after month to reach those who might have reasons to be interested in our work on the Holocaust question. I can no longer take care of all the health issues, the online work, and publish Smith’s Report as well. That is why Germar Rudolf has taken the helm here. There could not be a better guy to do it than Germar.

*** Nicholas writes:

“I’m assuming you won’t be able to get to our September 13 meeting in El Segundo (a Los Angeles beach suburb), but I’m wondering if you might care to provide a message to be read to the attendees concerning your decision to retire as editor of SR, what your plans are, and anything else you might wish to convey. Of course we’d like to know how you are faring generally and what you see in your future (remember Criswell’s reminder that ‘we are all interested in the future because that’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives’).”

I responded in part with this:

“Re my future and thinking about it, as I am told Criswell suggests. I have always tended to mess around in the present—to be here now, as the saying goes. In a certain way, the future was not very much there for me. I suppose that’s one reason that now I have next to nothing. At the same time, I never missed the future. It was as if the present were so full, so active, so very present, that not only nothing else was needed, there was no room in the moment for anything more.

“Well, I do not expect to be with what’s left of us this time. I hope it is going well for you who do make it. And for those who do not make it as well. It is probably mere coincidence, but at this moment, thinking of the room where we all pass a couple hours together three or four times a year, my throat feels the need for a cold beer.

“Maybe it’s the September heat wave down here. Or maybe it really is that room up there.

“Good night to you all.

“Bradley.”

*** The entire archive of Smith’s Report is online for the first time. Due almost entirely to the work of Germar. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in these early issues.

In issue #8 for example (1991) Alan Dershowitz is quoted (codoh.com/media/files/sr8.pdf) on the front page of The Daily Texan at U of Texas, Austin, saying: “Bradley Smith has no historical credibility at all and is a known anti-Semite and anti-Black racist with phony credentials.” I was dismayed. “Phony credentials?” What was he talking about? I had no credentials whatever. Maybe it was a poor joke, considering the situation. But Dershowitz goes on from there, another brilliant American academic. Very interesting stories about the Daily Texan staff, the President of the University, local media. David Cole was with me on that trip to Austin.

Alan Dershowitz

This is just one example of the stories you can find online now in Smith’s Report. Much of the material illustrates the “cultural” environment that revisionism was entering, and which the Jewish lobbies had turned their attention to in the most unfavorable way, ignoring the rights to Free Speech that Harvard Professor Steven Pinker writes about so graphically. (tinyurl.com/q46pt2d)

*** A guideline for professors (particularly the Dershowitz people at Harvard), who leave their comments with CODOH. Please use the comments section to demonstrate your ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off-topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse… you are, after all, an academic. (Thanks to Legalienate—slightly edited; legalienate.blogspot.mx.)

*** Did War on Hitler Actually Cause the Holocaust? This is the title of an article on the website of The Jewish Libertarian, which describes itself as where Anarcho-Capitalism and Judaism Converge. The article, by Rafi Farber, is self-reflective and intelligent, though he is discovering stuff that a lot of us here are already more than familiar with.

“Despite turning 180 degrees on almost all of my historical perspectives, there are some establishment positions that, even for me, are hard to give up. There was one major establishment position that still stuck in me like a dagger and was only loosened last week. That is, declaring and winning World War II was justified if only in order to save what was left of European Jewry.

“But then I read Ralph Raico, a libertarian historian and student of Ludwig von Mises. And he said something that totally took me for a loop. ‘Churchill’s refusal to listen to Hitler’s peace overtures may have doomed European Jewry.’ When I first read that sentence I did a double take. I didn’t even understand what Raico was saying on a basic level, the thought was so foreign to me. So I read it again. And again. Was I reading this right? How can that be?

“And then I just stared into space for a minute and said to myself, ‘Oh my God.’”

Rafi Farber
Rafi is from Miami, made Aliyah in 2007, and lives with his wife and two girls in Karnei Shomron. He writes financial content for a living.

Farber had realized that it could have been Winston Churchill who set the Final Solution and the Holocaust in motion. That Adolf Hitler may have been only the vehicle and not the direct cause. That Winston Churchill may have been the ultimate enabler.

Farber, reading this, experienced a break-through moment in his understanding of how the world might work. I liked the personally revealing way he writes and thought to nudge him forward another step or two. I posted a short message on his comments page.

Bradley Smith

September 7, 2015 at 8:58 pm

Interesting article but… it appears you believe the gas-chamber stories.

Perhaps I’m wrong.

rafifarber

September 7, 2015 at 9:04 pm (six minutes later)

Wow! I actually got a Holocaust denier to comment here! That’s a strange accomplishment. I am building bridges I’m not sure I even want built. Surely those who disagree with me will cite this as evidence that I have “gone too far”. Yes Bradley Smith. I “believe the gas-chamber stories”. I am a Jew whose extended family was murdered in the gas chambers.

And I physically visited the gas chambers and saw the 17-ton pile of human ash at Majdanek filled with my family who died there in the gas chambers that I was physically in. Those Jews who are reading this who want to know where I’m drawing the line, it’s here. This guy is on the other side. Do not comment here again, Mr. Smith.

Lisa

September 7, 2015 at 9:15 pm
(11 minutes have passed)

Please tell me you aren’t surprised.

rafifarber

September 7, 2015 at 9:27 pm (another 12 minutes)

Taken aback, but not shocked. Part of me has always wanted to seriously talk with one to examine them, but I don’t think I can handle it emotionally.

Bradley Smith

(The following comment is not dated because it was not posted. I have been permanently banned from The Jewish Libertarian.)

Can you provide, with proof, the name of one person who was killed in the gas chambers of Majdanek? No? Actually, I am on your side, Rafi, particularly with re to Ron Paul and the ideals of intellectual freedom. Try to put a damper on your “emotions,” an act that each of us should attempt when we find ourselves questioned. You and me, Rafi —at bottom there is not much difference. We’re just folk.

As it turns out Rafi is a self-described “religious” Jew. He’s all the way in. This story is developing, has already developed, but too late for this issue of SR.

*** Had a bone marrow biopsy performed at the VA. Some pain but nothing serious. All my blood levels are low. My oncologist wants to know if the cancer has gotten into the bone marrow, where blood cells are manufactured. The next stage of the treatment will depend on what they find.

In the event, it turns out that the cancer is not yet into the bone marrow. Good news.

*** Defamation equals Hate Speech around the world. Montana takes a step to introduce it to America. Its broad defamation statute reads in part: …“defamatory matter is anything that exposes a person or a group, class, or association to hatred, contempt, ridicule, degradation, or disgrace in society or injury to the person’s or its business or occupation.” And anyone who “communicates any defamatory matter to a third person without the consent of the person defamed commits the offense of criminal defamation.” Angela Merkel would probably approve. forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9770

*** Today Paloma drove me to the VA in Mission Valley where I had an appointment with a psychiatrist. It was because I have been using a sleeping pill for the past three or four years and my new primary-care doc thought it suspicious. In the event, Paloma was there to push the wheelchair as well. The form I was asked to fill out before I saw the psychiatrist had to do almost entirely with alcoholism. It just didn’t apply to me. I told Dr. Richer that when I was in his office and he simply folded the questionnaire in half and dropped it in his wastepaper basket.

He then began asking me simple questions about my family and what I do, and we came to the point where I said I was still working as an unsuccessful literary writer. He thought that amusing and bit by bit we got into what I write, and it wasn’t long before two issues were introduced into the conversation. The fact that I had come to doubt, after believing the story all my life, that the Germans used gas chambers for the mass murder of Jews. He found that very difficult to deal with. I impressed on him that there is a taboo against talking about it, and with the introduction of the word “taboo” he came around, agreeing that such thoughts are indeed taboo.

Then I introduced the subject of my most recent book, A Personal History of Moral Decay. He thought it was a wonderful title. He laughed. There was rather a lot of laughing as we talked. He questioned my use of the words “moral decay” to describe my own experience. I explained that the book was about my life before I discovered the gas-chamber story, and that, once I had discovered it and began to argue for a free exchange of ideas with regard to the historical question, I was condemned by all the best people everywhere as being morally corrupt.

I gave him outlines of some of the stories in the book that are hallucinogenic in nature, where I saw the Devil, where God made his presence known to me as an hourglass one time and a ball of fire another. Where I saw myself walking on the floor of the ocean amid uniquely strange sights. Again, he was laughing, asking questions. I related the incident in Korea when a Chinese infantryman came close to blowing off my right hand with a potato-masher hand grenade. He liked that story. He liked how, when the grenade landed in the dirt beside my face, the fuse smoking, I jumped off the side of the ridgeline not knowing how far the drop would be. In the event, my rifle caught in a shrub, and when I was trying to pull it down toward me the grenade exploded tearing up the hand. We had a fine exchange. In the end I asked him what he thought of such stuff. That I have been told that some of it is crazy.

It took him a moment, then he said: “There’s phenomena, but no symptom.”

Phenomena but no symptom! It was a concept I had never heard. I must have looked confused. There were a few moments of silence, then he said he would tell me a story. The story told of a man at the edge of a cliff being threatened by a tiger. The man jumped over the cliff and caught hold of a branch that was sticking out. Then he saw that a tiger was waiting for him below. Above him there was a tiger waiting. Below him a tiger waiting. What was he to do? At that moment he noticed a strawberry plant growing from the cliff-side. It had one very large strawberry. The man picked the strawberry and ate it. It was a juicy, delicious piece of fruit.

Dr. Richer looked at me. I looked at him.

“Bradley,” he said. “You don’t have to come back here for maybe six months.”

I didn’t say anything. The brain was in a kind of happy stasis contemplating the strawberry.

He sat back in his chair for a moment without speaking. Then he said: “You don’t have to come back at all, Bradley. You’re good.”

As Paloma was wheeling me out I told him I would send him a copy of my book. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You don’t have to read it.”

*** Margaret Huffstickler writes: “I think ‘Some of it happened, some of it didn’t’ (A line that I have at the top of my letterhead) is a wussy, counterproductive epigraph. What is ‘it’, anyway—the Holocaust? It didn’t happen, period. This epigraph starts the publication out in a defensive posture. I wonder who came up with it; it doesn’t seem like Bradley Smith’s style.”

Margaret: We have to agree on a definition for “Holocaust” before we say “it” happened or did not happen. There is no agreement, other than that of the True Believers. Even they have their differences. As do you and I.

*** Hannover comments on Jett Rucker’s lead story in SR 215, “Being Jewish: Remembering the Holocaust.”

“What’s Essential to Being Jewish? As if the world didn’t already know. It’s no stretch to say that Judaism IS the ‘holocaust’. Above all their religious relics, writings, wailing walls, stolen lands, and their violent apartheid state, etc., it’s the fraud of the ‘6 million & gas chambers’ that moves the Jewish masses.”

*** A Buddhist Argument for why Free Speech is Fundamental. Greg Lukianoff is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which was founded in 1999 to defend ‘freedom of speech and sanctity of conscience’ on American campuses, those “essential qualities of liberty and dignity. He has written:

“I always like to put the Buddhist argument for freedom of speech. Buddhists believe life is pain and they have a point. You do someone a tremendous disservice if you teach them that pain in life is a distortion of life. Because as soon as you start seeing hurtful things as being aberrations rather than part of normal human existence, then you start to see robust debate and disagreement as a distortion of the human experience rather than a part of the human experience. When you have students graduating from college believing that it is really, really bad if they have their feelings hurt, you are crippling them, you are preventing them from being able to deal with everyday life and debate.’”

Harvard professor Steven Pinker gave his speech titled “Why Free Speech Is Fundamental” at FIRE. (tinyurl.com/ooacgqp) We will point out here that neither Pinker nor Lukianoff has addressed the profound suffering experienced by masses of Jews when they hear questions being posed about the Holocaust. If only those who suffer so terribly would pay some attention to Buddha???

Which reminds me:

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, draw water. After enlightenment, chop wood, draw water.”

Or, roughly translated:

“Before revisionism, be honest, look for truth. After revisionism, be honest, look for truth.”

*** I’m being followed by the cardio folk at the VA now. Congestive heart failure. Vascular surgery scheduled a CT scan of the throat arteries. The vascular-surgery doc, a young Chinese lady, mentioned radiation for the throat as a possibility. That was a couple weeks ago. Today I was back at the VA and was told the throat arteries have remained constant for the last two years. No emergency for the time being.

*** Rafi Farber, the Jewish Libertarian Anarchist, writes to Smith:

“The Holocaust is a Jewish issue. It has nothing to do with you. Therefore I don’t care what you say about it, as much as I don’t give a crap about your personal opinion on the Machlokes Rava Abayey in the Gemara Bava Basra 65A. What’s Smith’s psak on the issue בור ברשות הרבים? Does Smith hold by the Tana Kama or הלכה כבתראי?

Rafi, caught up in his Jewishness, blindsides himself. The Holocaust narrative is not a Jewish story. It’s a story about Germans and Jews together—forever. Rafi says he doesn’t care what I say about the Holocaust, but he can’t stand the thought of considering any question about it. He is a True Believer on the one hand, and a Taboo Artist on the other. And that, in fact, is how the received account of the Holocaust is preserved in mass media and in aca-demia. True Belief and/or Taboo, the two faces of our finest professors and intellectual paragons.

Until next time,

Bradley