William McCalden
Full name: William David McCalden The Irishman David McCalden, better known as Lewis Brandon, played a short, but nonetheless important role in the development of the Holocaust denial movement. Prior to his entry into the Holocaust denial movement, McCalden founded the British National Party in 1975, before becoming an office bearer with the rival National Front. In the late 1970s, McCalden moved to the United States, where he worked briefly on the antisemitic publication American Mercury. With Willis Carto, McCalden founded the Institute for Historical Review in 1978 - the idea for the group was McCalden's. Until 1981, McCalden headed the group, using the pseudonym "Lewis Brandon". As Director of the IHR, McCalden was responsible for several groundbreaking activities, including the instigation of the group's 'International Revisionist Conferences' in 1979, the founding of the Journal of Historical Review a year later, and perhaps most famously, offering a US$50,000 reward for anybody, who could provide proof that the gas chambers existed. Mel Mermelstein, a Holocaust survivor, accepted the challenge, and following the IHR's refusal to honour the offer, Mermelstein sued, eventually winning a U.S. 90,000 settlement. In 1982, McCalden left the IHR, following a dispute with Carto, and founded 'Truth Mission' (no connection to Toben's similarly-named group. In this group's name, McCalden published a variety of publications, including Holocaust news and David McCalden's Revisionist Newsletter. He also published a book called Exiles From History. McCalden died in 1991 from AIDS, according to the IHR. On the IHR's web site, McCalden is described as "McCalden apparently had virtually unlimited energy to devote to revisionism. He seems to have collected audio tapes of every radio show that ever mentioned him, he produced several video tapes, brought to print several classic revisionist books, edited the Journal, and did all the other things that a small start-up outfit such as the IHR needs doing, and still found time to personally visit -- without any warning whatsoever -- most of the people who wrote to him from a return address less than a day's drive away." |