Christopher Cole

Christopher Cole was a fixture in leftist and progressive politics in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. In 1988 he founded the Los Angeles chapter of the influential leftist organization Refuse and Resist. As head of the L.A. chapter of Refuse and Resist, he organized benefit concerts and promotional gigs with artists such as Sinead O'Connor, Michelle Shocked, and Fishbone. Cole was also instrumental in organizing the network of politically and socially conscious organizations that toured with the Lollapalooza festival.

In 1991, he organized and hosted the national conference of Refuse and Resist, the first time it had ever been held on the West Coast.

Cole was a founding member of the Ad Hoc Coalition for Freedom of _Expression, which was formed in 1989 to protest the Bush Administration's denial of NEA grant money to controversial artists. Other members of the Coalition included officials of L.A. 's Museum of Contemporary Art , and the legendary L.A. performance art space, Highways. From 1989 through 1992, the Coalition organized art shows across Southern California , showcasing the works of censored artists.

A member of the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the National Writers Union, and the National Abortion Rights Action League, Cole helped organize a pro-choice concert for L.A. talk radio station KFI in 1990, featuring Sinead O'Connor and Susan Sarandon. That same year, Cole helped organize a concert at L.A. 's Wilshire Ebell Theatre to raise funds for the new democratic government of Czechoslovakia . He also co-produced a play, titled “Voices of the Velvet Revolution,” which showcased the suppressed writings of Eastern European dissidents under Communism.

In 1990 and 1991, Cole co-chaired “Project Booklift,” in which schools, libraries, and private citizens donated books to replenish the libraries in budding Eastern European democracies. By the time the first shipment of books was presented to Czech President Vaclav Havel in 1991, Project Booklift had collected over 400,000 books.

Cole continued to serve as head of the L.A. chapter of Refuse and Resist until 1992, when he became troubled by what he saw as a growing desire among some on the left to censor views they didn't agree with, as evidenced by the clamor for campus “speech codes” in the early ‘90s. Cole left the ACLU in 1992 to protest what he saw as that organization's reluctance to take a clear and unambiguous stand against censorship in all its forms. Since the mid ‘90s, Cole has been an occasional op-ed contributor to the Los Angeles Times, writing on free speech issues.

Cole co-founded Historians Behind Bars because, as he puts it, “This issue is the test of one's commitment to free speech. Anyone who is truly against censorship should feel impelled to speak out on this issue. So-called ‘anti censorship' activists who confine their righteous indignation to safe and comfortable controversies are cowards, pure and simple.”


Bradley R. Smith

Smith is an author, playwright, and free speech activist. He has been interviewed by dozens of print journalists, and has appeared as a guest on hundreds of radio and television talk shows and news broadcasts.

In 1979 Smith discovered that there were questions to be asked about WWII history that were not being asked, and that in fact it was taboo to ask them. He was not so interested in the questions themselves as he was in the taboo against asking them.

This was not Smith's first encounter with State and institutional censorship. During the 1960s he was a bookseller on Hollywood Boulevard where he was arrested and prosecuted for refusing to stop selling a book then banned by the U.S. Government--Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. He witnessed during that trial, which was the longest civil trial to have taken place in Los Angeles County, how special interests were only too willing to slander and censor writers whose views did not accord with their own.

When the Institute for Historical Review, a revisionist publisher, was burned to the ground on July 4th, 1984, Smith offered to do outreach for the Institute. His first effort was to publish Prima Facie, a newsletter distributed to journalists nation-wide, pointing out misrepresentations of fact with regard to the Holocaust story that were appearing in the mainline press. It was soon apparent that journalists were not interested in such matters. Prima Facie was discontinued after seven monthly issues.

Smith turned to the newly emerging phenomenon of talk radio. Here he was successful beyond his expectations, participating during the 1980s and early 1990s, in some 400 radio and television interviews. Holocaust revisonism was becoming a household term. During this time he co-founded The Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH)

In 1987 Smith published his first book, Confessions of a Holocaust Revisionist.

In the early 1990s Smith, going out on his own, began what was to become known as, simply, The Campus Project. This is widely recognized as the most successful revisionist outreach project ever attempted or realized. He ran essay-advertisements in student newspapers in colleges from Maine to California. He became the best-known revisionist on campus nation wide.

In the mid-1990s he founded CODOHWeb on the world wide web. CODOHWeb quickly became the primary international portal for revisionist information and opinion.

In 2001 Smith decided to turn from the Campus Project to finishing a second book In 2002, that is, shortly after 9/11, he published Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist. He found that the cultural and political enviornment had changed dramatically, and that he was going to have to rethink how to forward the idea of an open debate on WW II history.

Smith is a combat veteran (Korea, 7th Cavalry, where he was twice wounded), has been a deputy sheriff (Los Angeles County), a bull fighter (Mexico), a merchant seaman, and was in Saigon during the Tet offensive of 1968 as a freelance writer. He has been described by the Los Angeles Times as an "anarchist libertarian," and by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith as one of the most dangerous "extremists" in America. He has been married to a Mexican woman for 30 years, there are two children, and now one grandchild.

Smith argues that the German WMD (gas-chamber) question should be examined in the routine manner that all other historical questions are examined. He argues that the Holocaust is not a "Jewish" story, but a story of Jews and Germans together--forever. Those who want to challenge the concept of the "unique monstrosity" of the Germans should be free to do so. He believes it is morally wrong, and a betrayal of the Western ideal of intellectual freedom, to imprison writers and publishers who question publicly what privately they have come to doubt.