Bradley R. Smith
Softcover book. 316 pages
ISBN: 0972375600
Stock Number: 0522
During the early 1960s, Bradley Smith was arrested, jailed and prosecuted for selling a book that was then banned in the U.S., Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer. In the lengthiest civil trial to take place in Los Angeles up to that time, Smith was found guilty of selling this forbidden work.
The world has changed a lot since then, but this self-described “incorrigible romantic’ has remained as devoted as ever to defending free speech and open debate.
During the 1980s and 1990s, he directed a campaign to place ads in student newspapers at colleges and universities across the country calling for open debate on the hottest of hot issues -- the "Holocaust." His campaign generated enormous media attention across the country, and got him guest slots on many dozens of radio talk shows and on national television, including the Phil Donahue show. Now, in a warm, witty and thoughtful memoir, this modern-day Don Quixote looks back on the challenges, disappointments and joys of his decades-long battle against taboo and censorship.
Break His Bones details the organized campaign to suppress free speech and intellectual openness on the "Holocaust" issue, showing how skeptics are blacklisted, and their works banned. Smith gives a human face to the much-maligned "Holocaust deniers." "It might be said," he writes, that
Break His Bones "is an exercise revealing the subjective life of a thought criminal."
What drives this man? "Simply put," explains Smith, "I do not believe in thought crimes, in taboos against intellectual freedom. I do not believe it is thought crime to express skepticism about the 'gas chamber' stories. I do not believe it is thought crime to question U.S. support for Israel and its brutal and foolish policies toward Palestinians."
The Holocaust story, he says, has been "the instrument, the contrivance, that was used to 'morally' legitimate Jewish claims to Arab land in Palestine ... It remains the instrument used to morally legitimate the ongoing colonization of Palestinian Arab land by Jewish settlers ... The Holocaust story, with all its fraud and falsehood, continues to be used to support Israeli policies in Palestine, and to secure the funding of the Israeli military by the US Congress."
