Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident - CNN.com
Let's think about this. I'm not about to condemn something I haven't read, so I found the ad (above).
I didn't know about Smith. I found him in a Wikipedia article on holocaust denial:
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith founded a group called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).[53] He is the former media director of the Institute for Historical Review.[54] In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly tried to place newspaper ads questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.[55] Some newspapers have accepted the ads, while others have rejected them.[56] Bradley Smith has more recently sought other avenues to promote Holocaust denial - with little success. In June 2007, the film "El Gran Tabu" ("The Great Taboo") by Bradley R. Smith was presented at the festival "Corto Creativo 07" in Mexico.[57] On September 8, 2009, The Harvard Crimson school paper ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized and an apology was issued from the editor, claiming it was a mistake.[58]I think suppression of holocaust denials is unjustifiable and obviously ineffective. For those who believe such stuff, the censorship is just further confirmation of the great Jewish conspiracy, so they are stimulated to become ever more vociferous. The evidence of mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their allies seems to me undeniable, but people are perverse and will no doubt keep denying. It seems to me a better idea for the Crimson or any of us to try to give a reasoned response to Smith's questions.
Is it true that in Crusade in Europe DDE failed to mention what later got called "the holocaust"? If so, why might he have left it out? I can think of lots of likely reasons, but there must be biographers of Eisenhower or other historians who have a more precise idea of Eisenhower's motivations for writing his book. He published it in 1948, the year he became president of Columbia University, and was already being promoted as a future presidential candidate. My guess is that he wanted to tell a war story with himself as hero, as a campaign document. His nonmention of the facts (which may not even have been widely known yet) in such a book is therefore no indication of anything regarding the 5.7 million or 6 million or however many Jews were killed. They weren't part of his story.
Smith's other question is whether we can provide "with proof" the name of anyone killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surely that information is available (though we don't know what Smith would accept as "proof"). And there is no reason to limit ourselves to Auschwitz.
In short, I think it's much better to answer the questions than to try to deny the deniers. They just keep coming back. We should use the denials as an opportunity to make more people, especially younger people, aware of the overwhelming evidence of the shoah, its dimensions, its consequences and its lessons about what happens if we don't build institutions strong enough to prevent such mass exterminations. Because unfortunately, mass exterminations have continued for religious, ethnic or political differences since then, and will just go on unless we stop them.
