By Bradley R. Smith ∙ February 11, 2009
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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.
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I’ve noted elsewhere that life, for me, is less interesting than it used to be. Why so? I can only speculate that it’s because I have allowed the work to divide the life itself into two parts. Work on the one hand, “life” on the other. I have allowed the work to swamp the life…
CODOH was born of the initiative of its founder, Bradley R. Smith to promote intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust question on what was then a much smaller scene of information sharing, just at the moment of explosion of what would become a revolution of information exchange: the digital era and its medium: Internet….
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