Outlaw History #20

[This letter was mailed via USPO to subscribers to Smith's Report in December 2004.]

Dear Friend:

With this season twenty-five Christmases will have come gone since that September evening when I first read Robert Faurisson's essay on “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or the Rumor of Auschwitz.” Twenty-five Christmases! A lot of water has gone under the bridge, if I might coin a phrase.

I understood that Faurisson had awakened me to something I had not expected to be awakened to. With no thought for the future, absorbed in the deep drama of the moment, I was to give up everything else I was doing and turn my attention to promoting an open debate on the Holocaust question in media and on the campus.

I was largely ignorant of Holocaust history, but I understood that the story was protected by taboo, and that the taboo was a corrupting influence on American culture.

I had no especial knowledge of Germany or German history, no especial connection with Germans as a people, but Faurisson had caused me to understand in less than one hour, in one evening, that all my adult life I had accepted, without question, the allegedly “unique monstrosity” of the Germans, which in turn morally justified the invasion and colonization of Arab land in Palestine by European Jews.

Hello, then, to the Israeli-Arab wars of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Hello to the intifadas, Arab and Muslim outrage, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and hello to the growing revulsion toward America around the planet. The significance of Holocaust revisionism is suggested by the fact that it is criminalized by one European nation after another, by Israel, and is taboo everywhere else in the West. Truth doesn't need the State to defend it. Truth has no need for taboo. Fraud does.

For twenty-five years I have done what I could. There were times when I accomplished a lot, times when I accomplished little. Its “hard work,” as President Bush would remind us. Either way, it has never occurred to me to quit the work, to let it slide, to turn my attention in some new direction. I think we all understand that it is a slow, difficult slog to create a sea change in a cultural fraud as massive as the one we are addressing.

Meanwhile, here in the Smith household, it would appear to any passerby that we are an entirely normal family. A husband and wife, their teenage daughter, the five cats, four dogs, the parrot, some thirty parakeets, intermittent swarms of mice, cockroaches, ants and flies, and an unfinished, unpainted house.

We are all healthy. Considering our individual bouts with cancer, drug addiction, and old age, that's something to sing about. With regard to singing, Irene sings (in Spanish) in her church choir. The more she sings, the better she gets at it. Sometimes she sings while washing dishes and her ear is getting very good. Sometimes Cyrano, the parrot, will begin to sing with her. Unlike Irene, he does not sing in Spanish, has a voice like a parrot and no ear at all.

Recently Peter, the black and white Chihuahua, has begun to join in, standing at the bottom of the big parrot cage, looking up at Cyrano, and howling as tunefully as he can. Peter never sings with Irene alone, only with Cyrano when Cyrano sings with Irene. It's endlessly comic, and interesting, to watch and listen to this improbable trio.

Peter is the most companionable animal we have ever owned. He has insinuated himself into our lives with such insouciance that he now sleeps with us in our bed at night, under the covers. Never occurred to me that I would reach that place in my life where I would sleep with a dog. Never too old to learn a new trick.

Irene is at an evangelical church, or church affair, a couple, three times a week. As I write this letter it's Saturday afternoon, and this evening she will have a Christian youth group here in the house. Paloma has fallen away from the church, she was never in it very deeply, and this is a severe disappointment for her mother. Irene's husband is a disappointment also. Irene understands that he is “blind,” and he admits to being an “empty vessel.” Not all multicultural problems are ethnic or racial.

Paloma has been home since November 2003. She blew away her high school years adventuring in dangerous waters, but this past year she has been steady in her classes at adult school, passing her exams, and it appears that she will easily take care of her high school requirements over the next few months.

She doesn't know what will come next. When she was seven, she wanted to be a waitress, but she has let that one go. When I was seven I wanted to be a soldier. When I was eighteen, I was like Paloma. I didn't know what I wanted to do. My mother expected me to go to college, but I found school boring. So I joined the army.

When Paloma first came home she devoted herself to saving abandoned dogs and cats. Baja is full of abandoned dogs and cats. Having a dozen or so abandoned, untrained, half-sick, dogs and cats in the house (we have no yard) was rather a problem for Paloma's parents. It is easier to save dogs and cats than it is to find new owners for them.

One night I was at a taco stand reading Ram Dass on “How to Help.” Dass is rather a Buddhist, or Hindu, depending on circumstances, and was writing about how to help the dying, the sick, and the needy. People, not animals. While I read I came to see that for Paloma, saving abandoned and sick animals was “helping.”

After a few months she shifted her attention step by step from saving abandoned animals to “saving” young men who were discharged, or had escaped, from local rehabilitation centers. She understands as well as anyone how much help these individuals need in order not to fall back into drugs and all that goes with it. Sometimes I hear her on the telephone, talking like a “Dutch uncle” (aunt?) to some lost soul five, ten, fifteen years older than she is. One by one, she loses most of them. Sometimes it leaves her in tears. But she doesn't lose them all.

As for myself, here I am. I'm faced with the issues that you are faced with when you choose to do what I chose to do. I remain deeply interested in the work. I don't pay much attention to anything else. People tell me that they see me walking on the boulevard, but that I don't respond to their greetings. It's not intentional. While I walk, I lose myself in thought, or a kind of dreaming. I no longer pay attention to the store windows, the pedestrians, the little Indian ladies from Chiapas with their children selling junk jewelry or begging for a few pesos.

At the house I can see the ocean from the second floor teraza outside my office door. In the late afternoon I can watch the sun set behind the far edge of the sea. I used to watch it every afternoon. These days I seldom remember that the sun is going (as Mexicans say) to fall. These days I am more aware of the existence of the moon. The moon belongs to the night, and every night I look for it. Maybe, somewhere in my heart, I am aware of how much closer I am to the darkness than I am to light.

Nevertheless, there are two projects in the works that will knock your socks off. I can't speak about them publicly, for the usual reasons. I expect this story to begin to open up in February. There are now three speaking dates in the offing. We'll see. And my new Outlaw History newsletter is producing readers faster than I could have expected. Starting from 800 hits during August on to 63,000-plus in November. There's no end in sight.

Now that I see that this is going to work, the next move is to tie it in to the work down here on the ground. On campus, with the press, radio, etc. I have lots of ideas about how to do this. They are not complicated. I need extra hands to get the work done. Paloma is already working at it. Her work has contributed to the unexpectedly fast growth in the newsletter readership. I'm going to go straight ahead, this time getting help, delegating work to volunteers, rather than trying to do too much of it myself.

Twenty-five Christmases. As I write this letter, the majority of the Americans being killed and maimed in combat in Iraq have lived out fewer than 25 Christmases. They are fighting, and dying and being crippled, as a direct result of the failures of American foreign policy in the Middle East. That policy, in turn, is rooted in the German WMD (gas chamber) fraud. Without the gas chambers, there would have been no “Holocaust.” Without the Holocaust there would have been no Israel. And so on, and so on.

Holocaust revisionism is important work. Getting revisionist arguments out into public life via media and campus are at the core of the work. I am pleased to do this work. I am fortunate that so many of you have been so willing to help me do it. Without you, I would not have been able to do anything.

In any event, our best wishes for you, for your family, and for your friends during this Christmas season-from all of us here in Baja.

Bradley