No Smoke, Fire, or Truth in Anti-War Book
What were the causes of World War II? In his new book Human Smoke, novelist Nicholson Baker blames the victims of Hitler's aggression.
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In his new book, Human Smoke (New York: Simon and Schuster), Nicholson Baker gives this account of the views of Mohandas K. Gandhi in November 1938: “Even if the Allies were to go to war against Germany, Gandhi said, their action could bring to the Jews no inner joy or strength. Inner joy came from suffering voluntarily forgone.”
Baker is an accomplished novelist, but remarkably, his account of Gandhi’s views is not fictional. Baker moreover sees nothing wrong in them; and this is more remarkable still. So far as I can work out from my own conversations with an admittedly very limited sample of those who witnessed the Nazis’ racial policies, the number of European Jews who secured inner joy from their experience of ghettos, cattle trains, and gas chambers was zero.
Human Smoke purports to be a historical account of the political and social origins of WWII, drawn mainly from primary sources. If you imagine that primary sources equate to original research, then think again. Baker’s sources are not the records of statecraft. They are predominantly newspaper cuttings, shorn of context and confined entirely to English-language publications. It is an understatement to say that Baker lacks a historian’s interpretative ability to make sense even of these.
The resulting farrago neatly and with deliberation indicts political leaders of whatever power, and sentimentalizes the voices of those who opposed war. Human Smoke is a trivial, tendentious, ignorant, and more than moderately disgusting work dedicated to the proposition that the pacifist campaigners of the 1930s were heroes of the era. “They failed,” writes Baker in his concluding sentence, “but they were right.”
The most generous thing you can say about Baker’s thesis is that it is not of his own devising. It is a startlingly hackneyed restatement of the popular notion that: “Great armaments lead inevitably to war. The increase of armaments … produces a consciousness of the strength of other nations and a sense of fear.”
Those words are not Baker’s. They were written in 1925 by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of WWI. Grey’s view exercised a powerful influence on British diplomacy in the inter-war years. The tragedy is that it was wrong.
It is not true that arms races inevitably lead to war. (The rivalry of the late nineteenth century, whereby France and Russia challenged British naval supremacy, concluded with the Entente Cordiale of 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.) It was not true that the British-German naval arms race of the early twentieth century led to WWI. (Great Britain entered WWI under a Liberal Government that, after its landslide election victory of 1906, had in fact sought international disarmament under the auspices of the Second Hague Conference.) Above all, it was catastrophically untrue that arms competition and the interests of big business, rather than the imperialist designs of the Axis powers, led to WWII.
In the absence of serious historical scrutiny, Baker offers Manichean counterpoint. Churchill and Roosevelt are fingered for having made sly (and sometimes not so sly) antisemitic insinuations. Pacifist campaigners, on the other hand, “tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening.”
There was in reality a far from trivial overlap between the organized peace movement and pro-German sympathizers. The chairman of the Peace Pledge Union (the principal pacifist body in Britain), Canon Stuart Morris, held membership in the antisemitic and pro-Nazi organization known as The Link. The popular novelist and prominent America First speaker Kathleen Norris lauded the patently racist Charles Lindbergh as “America’s Joan of Arc”. (Baker cites a few American pacifist campaigners, but prudently if conspicuously omits that one.)
Baker’s quixotic thesis has been widely dismissed by reviewers, but not in my view with sufficient derision. There is an instructive parallel here with the work of Baker’s most favorable reviewer, the popular author Mark Kurlansky. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kurlansky marveled: “It may be one of the most important books you will ever read. It could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just war — and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the promoters of warfare.”
Kurlansky’s byline notes his own related book Nonviolence: 25 Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, which was respectfully and even generously reviewed on publication in 2006. When Kurlansky came to London to promote it, I debated his thesis with him on a television news program. I pointed out that, in rubbishing the notion that the struggle against Nazism was a just war, Kurlansky had taken one part of his argument directly from the discredited work of the Holocaust denier David Irving.
Kurlansky was visibly upset by my comment, but I was right. The point at issue was Kurlansky’s claim (p. 141 of his book) that “historians estimate that between 100,000 and 130,000 people” died in the Allied bombing of Dresden. They do not: they estimate the true figure at around 25,000-30,000. As the judge in the David Irving libel case of 2000, Mr Justice Gray, succinctly observed: “In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made.”
Neither Baker nor Kurlansky is a historian, let alone a responsible one. The only interesting aspect of their writing is how easily protesters against war can assimilate the mythology of those who are not anti-war, but anti-American and anti-British.
Oliver Kamm is an author and Times columnist. His blog is available here.
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17 Comments
jerry:In a sense Baker is attempting to answer Orwell’s Charge that “Pacifism is objectively Fascist.” Not having read the book but reading the review in the New York Sun, Baker’s response and the Sun’s editorial in response to Baker I cannot directly comment on the book. However, from the Exchange in the Sun it appears that Baker either believes that Hitler only killed the Jews because of Churchill’s failure to end the war on Germany’s terms after Dunkirk or that the Jews were expendable if it meant continuing the war. I think we all know from Hitler’s own writings and actions taken prior to the war that the Holocaust was an intrinsic part of Nazism and would have taken place had Britain ended the war in the summer of 1940.
Baker’s thesis is nothing more then the logical extension of the anti-Semitism that has overtaken much of the intellectual elite over the past decade. Too obsessed with his own moral superiority to come out and say that the “Jews are cause of all our troubles” he hides behind a false pacifism to see that the problem is removed. Baker and those who think like him are, to paraphrase Orwell, objectively the new neo-Nazis.
If Baker wants to blame someone besides Hitler for the Holocaust he should focus his attentions on Joseph Stalin. Without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to secure his rear Hitler could not have successfully invaded the West in the Spring of 1940. He would have had to keep too many troops in the East. Both Britain and France would have had more time to modernize and build up their forces to face the Germans. There is a simple formula here: No Red-Brown alliance, no Holocaust. Unfortunately, the sympathy and nostalgia that today’s left has for Communism prevents Baker from seeing this simple truth.
Apr 18, 2008 - 5:49 am Snoop-Diggity-DANG-Dawg:Mr. Baker likes sunny mornings, puppy dogs AND peace. What a nice, nice man.
Apr 18, 2008 - 5:52 am uburoi:It is hard to say who is the bigger fool here: Baker, Ghandi, or Kurlansky?
Apr 18, 2008 - 6:45 am Rubicon:Historic revisionism, whether via the print media, the silver screen, or the supposedly objective news media, is rampant. And that many of the left have usurped so many positions in those mediums, means they & they alone get to decide what they want history to say. Facts be damned.
Apr 18, 2008 - 6:56 am Saltherring:My father entered one of those death camps as an allied soldier. He was physically ill at the sights. As were many others. Fortunately for me & I suppose a few others, some from that era actually gave us a vocal history lesson so what really happened can never be forgotten.
Yet some are doing a great job convincing our youth that the history we know as fact, is untrue & would have been different, if the Allies had just agreed to allow the Axis powers to have & do whatever they wanted.
We face the same revisionism when there are discussions about 9-11, the war on terror, Afghanistan, & one day we may have actual evidence that Saddam sent whatever WMD he had,
to the Bekka Valley.
Bush & company have done an abysmal job managing the war. They have also failed miserably to actually convey events on the ground, as they are in fact. They have allowed media types sympathetic to any cause that is in opposition to free markets, democracy, & especially America, to have their way with facts & the truth. The whole truth that is.
Too bad history proves their utopian society never has, is, or will work. Too bad many will suffer because these guys have duped so many into believing in their one world society that the government runs for all of us.
The world faces serious crisis. The world faces destruction on levels we have never imagined or have prayed would never happen. By putting out crap, many on the left should be held directly responsible for the death & destruction their distortions will bring about!
The missing element in most pacifist historical analyses is the acknowledgement that evil exists, and that it would prevail, excepting forceful confrontation. Pacifist dogma supposes that when confronted with the olive branch, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would have laid down their weapons and engaged in a hug-fest for peace. Evil in 1938 and now cannot be appeased. It must be confronted by forces greater than itself….and destroyed…..with only fools such as Jimmy Carter and B. Hussein Obama to believe otherwise.
Apr 18, 2008 - 7:27 am Michael W. Perry:Those who’d like a book that describes why pacifists get it wrong like this may want to read a new G. K. Chesterton collection I edited, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.
According to Chesterton, among the ideas and movements that lead to dictatorship and war is modern pacifism for: “Pacifism and Prussianism [militarism] are always in alliance, by a fatal logic far beyond any conscious conspiracy.”
He goes on to explain why the logic of pacifism drives in to ignore brutal military aggressors and to slander peaceful democracies and their soldiers, while advocating unworkable solutions to the problem of war (primarily broad international institutions). Keep in mind that he is describing pacifist behavior in the closing days of World War I. Pacifism’s dreadful behaviors didn’t begin with the Vietnam or Iraqi wars. It flows from the core principles of modern pacifism, particularly its assumption that global peace is achievable.
In 1932, Chesterton warned that Hitler would become dictator in Germany and drive his nation toward a war that would begin over a border dispute with Poland–precisely what happened seven years later. In one telling argument written that year, he warned that if the “Young Men” of World War I who now ran British politics didn’t find a way to deter Hitler, they would see a “New War” that would make the first look like nothing.
To give you a sample of Chesterton genius with words and ideas, here are two quotes among many. The second, written as the public grew weary of war in late 1916, almost perfectly describes our situation in Iraq today.
“That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.”
“We have reached a particular point in the present war at which it is supremely necessary to stretch our minds, so as to take in the large things and not merely the small. For it is not too much to say that the large things are going right and the small things are going wrong. Pessimism or even panic can be created by a simple trick of mental contraction.”
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle
Apr 18, 2008 - 8:14 am David Thomson:I have done far enough studying of the Nazi Party to adamantly state that violence towards others is intrinsic to its very ideological foundation. Adolph Hitler had every intention of murdering Jews once he had the opportunity. Propaganda based on Jew hating was employed masterfully to drop the defenses of the West. The Jews were held responsible for all the evils afflicting the German people. Any friction existing between Germany and the rest of the world was due solely to the influence of allegedly vile Jews. I strongly recommending reading The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust by Jeffrey Herf.
I have just ordered a copy of Michael W. Perry’s edited work on G.K. Chesterton. It should be well worth reading. Chesterton often had many incredible insight concerning the human condition. I am quite familiar with him and already own a number of his books.
Apr 18, 2008 - 10:56 am Dark Helmt:Yet another over simplification of a complex event with personal agendas mucking up the waters every step of the way.
Oh wait, that is history 101
Apr 18, 2008 - 11:19 am Tom W.:Somebody had to post it, so let me be him:
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
–John Stuart Mill
Apr 18, 2008 - 12:37 pm GM Roper:Mr. Kamm: “They were written in 1925 by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of WWI.”
A minor correction in an otherwise superior posting. 1925 is NOT at the outbreak of WWI. 1925 is slightly POST WWI.
Apr 18, 2008 - 1:42 pm Tony:And slowly but surely the history of the world is being rewritten.
The question is, how long will it take……30 years?….50 years?….before those enjoying the freedoms bought by the deaths of 55 million souls convince each other that Hitler was, in fact, the good guy.
Inevitable and utterly shameful.
Apr 18, 2008 - 2:47 pm Cogito Ergo Doleo:Hrmm . . . Nit-picknic? Mr. Kamm’s comment may confuse some slightly; but, given the fact most anyone aware of WWI knows the years it devoured, Mr. Kamm’s meaning is not lost on informed readers (and, ISTM, ill-informed ones wouldn’t notice). For clarity’s sake, I s’pose the sentence might have been more accurately phrased thusly: “Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of WWI in 1914, penned those words at least a decade after the fact (in 1925).”
OTOH, we both agree Mr. Kamm’s assessment is witheringly accurate, thank HIM. (And, FYI, it’s “Post-WWI,” GM Roper :). People who live in niggle-nitzical houses ought not toss bared boner-groaners . . ..)
Just my deux.
Apr 18, 2008 - 2:51 pm OmegaPaladin:I think the author was trying to say:
“They were written in 1925 by Sir Edward Grey. [Grey had been the] British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of WWI.”
Apr 19, 2008 - 7:57 am L. Raj:Evil exists. It must be confronted and rooted out.
Sadly, even great men like Mahatama Gandhi could see only good in people and never knew how to adequately counter evil. As a result, India was partitioned and millions killed in the process. Mahatma Gandhi still refused to see the pain of partition on a personal level and called on suffering Hindus and Sikhs to cheerfully, non-violently embrace death doled out by the militant muslims of Pakistan.
His countless peace marches, hunger strikes and emotional blackmail techniques have been used time and again by peaceniks around the world. Like children with temper tantrums, they insist on prevailing against sound judgment and reasoning. Sometimes, like well meaning parents, we give in to avoid the pain of dealing with their whining and crying and public embarrassment.
Sadly, this is bad policy ! Evil can not be reasoned with and it certainly does not remember “One good turn deserves another.” Quicker everyone understands this, the better - as we are facing another great evil in the world and we need to face it with firm resolve.
Apr 21, 2008 - 8:20 am J.J. Sefton:Hats off to most here especially Rubicon and Tom W. Of course if (heaven forbid ‘when’) a mushroom cloud appears over Central Park, you can bet that the Dhimmi Carters, Noam Chomskys and VIchy-crats will naturally blame us for it.
Sad
Apr 22, 2008 - 11:57 am Misanthropicus:There was mixure of factors which lead to WWII: the ascension & rivalry of the one party/states in Europe (Soviet Union/3rd. Reich), the militarization & acute ideologization of both (on nat’l revanchist and supremacis line of Germany, and the attempt of mondialization of the marxist doctrine/Russian imperialism line in Soviet Union) - AND! the european pacifism.
Apr 23, 2008 - 6:22 am Mortimer:Remember the “Ah! Les cons!”? (”Ah! Those idiots!”/ Daladier, about the adoring crowds praising him for saving the continent’s pece when returning from Munchen after ceding to Hitler the entire Mittle Europe).
Appeasement - don’t we see similarities beween those years’ pacifists and our times’ enlightened, lefty crowds? and what about the consequences of appeasement?
It’s easy to have contempt for these pacifists of WW ll. But I object to trashing Gandhi: he was being totally consistent and he abhorred Nazism. He was opposed to war on moral grounds and was no Jew hater. Our cause was just, but at the end we were becoming more and more callous and brutal. Initially we condemned the Nazis for bombing of Warsaw, Guernica and Rotterdam but at the end of the war we were burning a Japanese city off the map every 4 days. Does it matter what the actual statistics of deaths in Dresden? It was an act of horror, even Germans have souls. It was not our finest hour. More people died in the Tokyo firestorm than the Atomic attacks. Yes, they started the war and were brutal as heck but let’s look at our souls and methods if we want to make any claims to moral superiority. It seems that today’s cons can’t get beyond Munich and Auschwitz and the logic that engenders where there is no limit to what we should do to the enemy.
Apr 24, 2008 - 4:26 pm