In his publication Revisionist Letters, Smith tried to differentiate between antisemites who used Holocaust denial to attack Jews and his putative objective of uncovering the truth. He asserted that his editorial policy objective was to encourage “exposés of bigotry and antisemitism” in Holocaust “revisionism.” An article in the magazine argued that the participation of “Nazi apologists” in Holocaust denial circles precluded the participation of other supporters, particularly the radical left.{17} The author, Laird Wilcox, wondered how “revisionists” could argue that their speech was suppressed when there was a “substantial element in [their] own ranks that doesn’t believe in it [free speech], except for themselves.”{18} Smith reiterated this idea in a column in his local newspaper, admitting that although the “search for truth” about the Holocaust was not antisemitic, there were “bigots” in the movement who were “self-avowedly anti-Jewish and who used revisionist scholarship as an attack on Jews.”{19} Smith seemed to be aware that any linkage of his efforts with extremist and racist groups would be a liability, particularly on campus.
His effort to distance himself from these overtly antisemitic groups was reflective of a shift by deniers to sever their overt ties to an array of neo-Nazi and extremist groups. Leonard Zeskind, the research director of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Kansas City, Missouri, and a respected specialist on extremism in America, categorized Smith’s efforts as reflective of a general shift among “white supremacists” and extremists away from the political margins into the mainstream by avoiding any overt association with swastika-bedecked or white-sheeted fascist groups. David Duke’s re-creation of his past during the presidential campaign was an example of this strategy,{20} which confuses many people who can easily identify the objectives of the Klan, White Aryan Nation, and Posse Comitatus but who find it more difficult to recognize extremism when it is cloaked in a seemingly rational and familiar garb.
The ad Smith began to circulate in the spring of 1991 contained the deniers’ familiar litany of claims. It declared the gas chambers a fraud, photographs doctored, eyewitness reports “ludicrously unreliable,” the Nuremberg trials a sham, and camp internees well fed until Allied bombings destroyed the German infrastructure in the most “barbarous form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasions,” preventing food from being delivered and causing the inmates to starve. According to Smith the notion of a Nazi attempt to destroy the Jews was the product of Allied efforts to produce “anti-German hate propaganda.” Today that same propaganda was used by powerful forces to “scape-goat old enemies,” “seek vengeance rather than reconciliation,” and pursue a “not-so-secret political agenda.”{21}
He repeated the familiar protest that his sole objective was to uncover the truth through an open debate on the Holocaust—debate that had been suppressed by a powerful but secret group on campus as part of their larger political agenda. “Let’s ask these people—what makes such behavior a social good? Who benefits?”
The ad contended that denial was forcing “mainline Holocaust historians” to admit the “more blatant examples” of Holocaust falsehoods. It was the deniers who had forced them to revise the “orthodox” Holocaust story. They had had to admit that the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was far smaller than originally claimed, and had been made to confess that the Nazis did not use Jewish cadavers for the production of soap. It is correct that in recent years newly revealed documentation has allowed scholars to assess more precisely the number of Jews thought to have been murdered at Auschwitz.{22}, [2] It is also accurate that scholars have long written that despite wartime rumors to the contrary, the Nazis apparently did not use Jewish cadavers for soap. There has been a wide array of other “revelations” by Holocaust historians, all part of the attempt to uncover the full details of one of the most horrifying acts of human destruction. Smith suggested to his readers that scholars and others who work in this field, all of whom vigorously repudiate Holocaust denial, have been compelled to admit the truth of deniers’ claims: “We are told that it is ‘anti-Jewish’ to question orthodox assertions about German criminality. Yet we find that it is Jews themselves like Mayer, Bauer, Hier, Hilberg, Lipstadt and others who beginning [sic] to challenge the establishment Holocaust story.”{23} This notion—that deniers have exposed the truth and mainline historians are scrambling to admit it—remains a linchpin of the deniers’ strategy. It has two objectives: to make it appear that Jewish scholars are responding to the pressure of the deniers’ findings and to create the impression that Holocaust deniers’ “questions” are themselves part of a continuum of respectable scholarship. If establishment scholars, particularly those who are Jews, can question previously accepted truths, why is it wrong when Bradley Smith does the same?
Though much of the ad consisted of familiar rhetoric, Smith added a new twist that had a particular resonance on American college campuses. Since the 1980s the concept of “political correctness” has been a source of academic conflict. Conservative political groups have accused the “liberal establishment” of labeling certain topics politically incorrect and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the curriculum. Smith framed his well-worn denial arguments within this rhetoric, arguing that Holocaust revisionism could not be addressed on campus because “America’s thought police” had declared it out of bounds. “The politically correct line on the Holocaust story is, simply, it happened. You don’t debate ‘it.’” Unlike all other topics students were free to explore, the Holocaust story was off limits. The consequences, he charged, were antithetical to everything for which the university stood. “Ideology replaces free inquiry, intimidation represses open debate, and… the ideals of the university itself are exchanged for intellectual taboos.”{24} While most students who had to decide whether the ad should be published did not overtly succumb to CODOH’s use of the political correctness argument, many prove prone to it, sometimes less than consciously—a susceptibility evident in their justifications for running the ad. Among the first universities to accept the ad were Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Ohio State, and Washington University.{25}, [3]
At the University of Michigan the saga of the ad had a strange twist. Smith mailed camera-ready copy directly to the Michigan Daily. According to the paper’s business manager, the ad “slipped through without being read.” When it appeared the business staff was appalled to learn what they had allowed to happen. On the following day they placed a six-column ad in the paper apologizing for running Smith’s ad and acknowledging that its publication had been a mistake. They declared it a “sorrowful learning experience for the staff.”{26} The manager told the Detroit Free Press, “We make mistakes like any organization.”{27}
2
The memorial stone at Auschwitz lists the number of victims of the camp as 4 million. Research now indicates that the number of people who died in the Auschwitz/Birkenau gas chambers was between 1.5 and 2 million, of whom 85 to 90 percent were Jews.
3
The papers discussed in this chapter function as private newspapers. The courts have broadly defined their editorial discretion to accept or reject ads. In situations of “state action,” where a state university administration controls the newspaper’s content, the courts may prohibit content-based rejection of the ads.