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What happens when a man with a conscience takes the hype and taboo that surround the Holocaust seriously -- and then goes public with his doubts and questions? Bradley Smith's Break His Bones is an examination of the inner and outer consequences for the author of his growing doubt about many of the Holocaust stories. As Break His Bones makes plain, the broken friendships, financial straits, and threat of personal harm that crop up throughout the book are no match for Smith's intellectual rigor and sense of obligation to inform others. Break His Bones reveals - in Smith's affable but unsparing style - many of the influences, some quite unexpected, that brought him to his work of publicizing revisionism on campus and over the airwaves. His experience as a combat infantryman in Korea, his prosecution for selling a book banned by the U.S. Government, his readings in Zen and Vedanta, his association with libertarian anti-war protestors, and his 25-years of living largely in the Jewish community -- perfectly happily as it were -- were all a part of the mix. Smith didn't suddenly discover intellectual freedom when he discovered Holocaust revisionism. When he was a bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1960s he was arrested, jailed and prosecuted for knowingly selling a book that was banned by the U.S. Government - Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Smith argued then that students (everyone) had the right to read radical literary works. Today he argues that students and all the rest of us have the right to read radical papers on the Holocaust question. Smith is uncertain where the problem is. Revisionist readers, and supporters of other taboo causes, will prize Break His Bones for telling what it's like, in the face of a thousand difficulties, to do the unglamorous work of arranging and doing radio and television interviews, and placing ads in college newspapers (it's not as easy as its sounds!). Smith's adventures, and misadventures, on one tour in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts are the stuff of a matchless (and cautionary) tale available nowhere else. The author's impressions of the human qualities of an array of revisionists from David McCalden and Tom Marcellus to Mark Weber and Ted O'Keefe make Break His Bones rare reading. So controversial is this autobiographical exercise that after a small advertisement for it ran in the Harvard Crimson, the Crimson staff was "overwhelmed" by the number of protests it received and the ad was suppressed. The same thing happened at the Daily Cal (Berkeley) and at the Daily Texan at University of Texas. Temple University professor Franklin Littell, who is a Holocaust authority and an ordained minister of the Gospel, once wrote that Smith keeps company with the one who "wanders to and fro in the earth and up and down in it." This "Lucifer" writes about riding his daughter's bicycle on a stormy day, about education, honor, and Ramana Maharshi, taking the family dog to the pound to end its life, and about bitter and sometimes comical aspects of combat that don't usually show up in war movies. Smith writes about the commonality between American combat veterans and Holocaust survivors - and how they differ. He notes the honor that Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank share, and where they part company. He laughs at the "eyewitness" testimony of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, and points out the obvious when he tours the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum -- there is not one exhibit there that even tries to prove that gas chambers existed. Break His Bones is full of surprising connections and provocative allusions. At the same time it is a work of unabashed self-criticism, even self-incrimination, for in his subjective life Smith, like all others great and small, understands that he is guilty of almost everything. Smith is an author, playwright, and free speech activist. He has been interviewed on hundreds of radio talk shows, by scores of print journalists, and has appeared on television via 48 Hours, Donahue, Jerry Williams and others. Smith is a combat veteran (Korea, 7 th Cavalry, where he was twice wounded), has been a deputy sheriff (Los Angeles County), a merchant seaman, a bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard, an activist for free speech (he was prosecuted for intentionally selling a book then banned by the U.S. Government – Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer ), and was in Saigon during the tet offensive of 1968 as a freelance writer . The Los Angeles Times had this to say about Smith’s play, “The Man Who Stopped Paying”. “In Bradley Smith’s ‘The Man Who Stopped Paying’ .... bureaucrats are the enemy, for while they maintain the welfare systems, they also maintain the machines and programs that will destroy those systems. [....] “For the first time in a long time on stage, an anarchist libertarian has sounded out.... With his love of nature and disgust for the bomb and the Feds, Smith could become a kind of playwright laureate of an American Greens Party, but then he would probably rather go it alone.” Beginning in the early 1990s Smith has run essay-advertisements in student newspapers at colleges and universities around the country calling for intellectual freedom with regard to the Holocaust question. Pursuing this American ideal of free inquiry and open debate has earned him the emnity of those who represent what Norman Finkelstein has so aptly termed the “Holocaust Industry.” Smith has been married to a Mexican woman for 25 years, they have two daughters, and live in Baja, Mexico. Nevertheless, an organization like The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith will intentionally lump Smith in its grab bag of racialist extremists because he is a “skeptic” with regard to the alleged genocide of the European Jews. Smith argues that the Holocaust question should be examined in the routine manner that all other historical issues are examined. That simple idea is the long and short of it. No idea is considered more radical on university campuses, and no idea is more actively suppressed by the professorial class and our mainline media. Why? Who benefits? Smith’s writings, an unusual mix of autobiography and journalism, focus on how events, oftentimes in remote parts of the world, impact on his daily life.
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Break
His Bones:
The Private Life
of a Holocaust Revisionist
