People often refer to the Allied response in WW II when talking about “just” wars. American author Nicholson Baker sees things in a very different light, arguing that the world would have done better to pay heed to mid-century pacifists.
In Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster), Baker takes direct aim at the assumption that the British and Americans acted without self-interest in countering Hitler’s aggression.
To create his unconventional history, Baker drew on articles, speeches, memoirs, letters and other historical documents of the time, culminating in the moment that the U.S. entered the war. He uses this “collage” of sources to bolster his claims that Roosevelt and Churchill were bigoted warmongers, compelled more by arms sales than by the desire to stop Hitler.
Best known as a novelist, Baker also focuses on the efforts of pacifists of the time, from the famous Gandhi to the lesser-known, including American Jeanette Rankin. The first woman elected to the American House of Representatives, she voted against declaring war on Germany, saying "I want to stand by my country. But I cannot vote for war. I vote no." Later, she added, "I felt that the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war, she should say it."
Baker’s controversial re-examination of this pivotal time has sparked many strong reactions, including a heated debate in a recent episode of CBC Radio’s Talking Books.
Panelists Tom Jokinen, Antanas Sileika and Lynne Van Luven disagree about the quality of the writing in Human Smoke, as well as the validity of Baker’s interpretations. Find out why one panelist gets a stomachache just looking at this book, while another thinks it’s beautifully researched.
Listen to host Ian Brown and his guests talk about Human Smoke here:
This program first aired May 23, 2008 on Talking Books. [runs 26:40].
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Comments
I am totally uninterested in this author's view on a subject we know so much about through hindsight. He should have stuck to novels.
Posted by: Ian Ross | June 11, 2008 12:20 AM
It wasn't the politicians like Churchill and Roosevelt who fought the war. While the isolationists in the US kept them out of WWII for two years, young men from the US enlisted via Canada to help fight Hitler. That makes the war just right there...those young guys were doing what they thought was right. Does Baker think they were paid a lot of money to do it, or that they were forced to sign up?
Maybe Baker could ask the British Parliament why Chamberlain was replaced by Churchill when he pulled his Pacifist nonsense, costing Czechoslovakia and Poland their freedom. If Churchill had been leader, Hitler would probably have been stopped before he got started.
Peter White was a young officer with a Scottish platoon. He wrote a book called "With The Jocks" that is well worth the read. After two years of intimacy with death, White expressed amazement at how the young Scots (average age 20) kept going in the face of impossible adversity. He claimed there was simply no reason for them to go on, but he pointed out that most soldiers by that time were running only on a sense that they were doing the right thing.
A lot of good, decent people died fighting Hitler and the Japanese and that's not counting the more than 12 million Jews and Slavs who died in concentration camps. None of the soldiers had to be coerced to go and fight, and they are the ones who wrote the book on what is just. We don't need the opinions of after-the-fact theorists to assess what was just.
Posted by: Gordon Robertson | June 11, 2008 01:20 AM
Frankly, the most objectionable thing in this historical examination, to me at least, is the idea that pacifism was somehow ignored, and would have solved the world's problems. As was pointed out in the podcast, pacifism was tried, and found wanting, by Neville Chamberlain (who, in his defence, really had no other options given how unprepared Britain was for war). And the reason pacifism couldn't have worked is, there is absolutely no evidence, anywhere, that Hitler would have abided by any negotiated agreement made with him. He first came to power on the strength of his promises to violate the existing Versailles Treaty, strung Chamberlain out before ignoring his agreements there, and finally, and most spectacularly, so totally shocked the Soviets by invading them that Stalin famously spent days locked away before he could come to grips with the betrayal. Heck, he even turned on his own followers, eliminating them when they even looked like they were going to threaten him.
A Gandhi quote was mentioned in the podcast; "You must accept that thousands will burn." It was meant to symbolize the human cost of pacifism. A pacifist response to Hitler, however, wouldn't have meant thousands burned, however. Hitler managed to kill six million Europeans and another ten or so million Soviets; allowing him free reign would have meant tens of millions would have died, many of them in the most terrible of ways.
And that doesn't even count the people who would have died if the imperialist Japanese of the time had been unopposed, as well.
Posted by: Garnet Johnson-Koehn | June 12, 2008 01:32 AM
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