A Review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II,
the End of Civilization (New York
If there is one common thread
throughout Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke:
The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, it is that
Nicholson Baker is a pacifist. Baker is so pacifistic that he refuses to
clearly state any thesis whatsoever, leaving the reader to wind their way
through the chaotic and contradictory incidents he uses to make his point:
simply, that “hurting people is bad.” Baker, and those who find Human Smoke moving or, in the case of
atheist magician Penn Jillette, “devastating,” argue that this is a dramatic
style, a way to engage the reader and provoke debate. I would argue that it
seems to be a charlatan’s empty ploy to present their narrative as authentic,
when it is actually a shallow and dishonest representation of complicated human
events. In fact, the only stated argument found anywhere in the entire book is
in the synopsis on the back, which claims Human
Smoke is “a moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized
much of the 1930s and ‘40s.” Alas, Baker never provides us with the myths he is
seeking to refute; only the juxtaposition of events he thinks demonstrates
moral equivalency between Axis and Atlantic Allies. By doing so he is dishonest
by omission and anyone with even a basic understanding of WWII history cannot
help but wonder whether Nicholson Baker did so out of staggering ignorance or
for the insidious purpose of denigrating those who fought to save Western
Civilization.
Because Human Smoke has no clear written arguments - only insinuated ones -
I am forced to try and explain what Baker is trying to say, rather than appeal
to his own well stated aims. The primary argument of the book seems to be that
pacifism is moral perfection. Those who refused to commit themselves to the
folly of collective security agreements, arms races, and building planes, such
as the pacifist outliers of pre-WWII, are not the cowering, naïve, and
anti-Semitic masses that Baker believes historians have accused them of being.
Rather, they are the Cassandra’s who fought against a tide of capitalism,
governmental folly, and suicidal national pride. To prove this, Baker quixotically
appeals to organizations like the Nye Committee or individual examples like
Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ghandi, who just so happen to have been
naïve anti-Semites. Baker escapes this uncomfortable reality, in his own
estimation, by pointing out that “warmongers” like Winston Churchill and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt also espoused their own brand of patrician
anti-Semitism. According to Baker, Churchill and Roosevelt followed the same
logic as the pacifists. The agreed, he contends, that Germany
Baker is correct to show that not
all pacifists went around claiming that Jewish banking interests, or Jewish
communists depending on which party line they towed, were the source of
international tension. Some, like the members of the Peace Pledge Union, were
so committed to peace they even signed up for a membership card—a membership
card being the internationally recognized declaration that I care about this
enough to fill it out and buy a stamp. But alas, Baker’s continued emphasis on showing
that the sale of armaments between nations was tantamount to treason and that
global capitalistic enterprise played a role in the making of the war itself
smacks of the same inane logic held by the likes of those on the Nye Committee
and Lindbergh. I hate to burst Baker’s bubble, (no, wait, I don’t), but the
Soviet Union, which he glaringly leaves out of the first 200 pages of the book
save for a reference to starvation in the Ukraine, was selling armaments to
Germany as well. They also invaded Poland ,
Finland , Lithuania , Estonia ,
and Latvia Soviet Union and its murderous campaign
of purges. It is only spoken of as a looming menace that leads Winston
Churchill into saying positive things about Benito Mussolini.
Ironically, none of this compares to
Baker’s maniacal dishonesty and apologist nonsense as it pertains to his claims
that the blame for the war lay with the Allies and Axis equally, and that
neither held any moral high ground. Serious historians have argued that had the
Allies been more committed to their collective security agreements, or if the United States
The shear stupidity of moral
equivocation between Germany United States ,
by selling arms to China Britain , America , and Japan
was a national insult—any secondary reading into the topic, outside of Japan Soviet Union in 1939. Perhaps having some knowledge of
these events might have offered perspective on the perceived need to prepare
for further Japanese aggression by the United States China
up until the mid-1930s, the United States
had been selling steel and oil to Japan United States
There is one positive aspect to the
book, and that is Nicholson Baker’s frequent references to the tragedy of
Jewish refugees as they struggled to extricate themselves from the clutches of
the Nazis. He is right to portray the leaders of the Western world as craven
and stupid for blocking the flight of people in mortal jeopardy. But, again,
Baker contradicts himself by placing Ghandi and the pacifists as exemplars, all
of whom argued that Herr Hitler could be reasoned with long after he had begun
imprisoning and murdering his political and social enemies. Worse still is
Baker’s suggestion that the Madagascar Plan was a reasonable thing the Germans
considered for the nearly 4 Million Jews they held in the New Reich (Western Poland,
Bohemia
Baker’s primary, most inane, and
asinine argument in Human Smoke is
the notion that pacifism in the face of murderous Fascism, or Communism (there
are very few differences), is something to be applauded. There is an apt poem
that starts, “They first came for the Jews,” and ends with “then they came for
me.” In the case of the Second World War, it is worth noting that while FDR might
have let Hitler come for the Jews, he didn’t wait till the Fuhrer came around for the American people to start helping bomb
Hitler’s sick regime out of existence, and for that he deserves at least some
credit. But beyond Churchill and Roosevelt, Baker fails to realize that while
Ghandi might laud the idea of men walking unarmed into bullets and gas
chambers, he did so in the relative safety of waging a campaign for national
rights against Churchill’s British Empire that would never even attempt
exterminating India
In the end there is little that can
be done to convince someone like Baker that it is better to kill than be
subjugated, murdered, or suffer the murder of your loved ones and friends. All
I can do is present an alternative stories to Baker’s bleak morally bankrupt
universe. Although I find his style of hundreds of short snippets to be
monotonous and boring, I think I can improve upon them and refute Baker with
the right set of examples:
Marion
Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who had been imprisoned and tortured by
the Nazis joined the Dutch Resistance. She spent several years of her life
rescuing Jewish children from almost certain murder at the hands of the Nazis.
While hiding Jewish children, a Dutch Nazi led the Germans to their hiding
spot. During the first inspection the children weren’t found, but the Dutch
Nazi returned later to discover the children. Marion Pritchard shot the man
dead to protect the young souls that relied on her. It was 1942.[1]
* * *
Private
Angelo Antonelli was born a peasant and found himself drafted into the Italian
Army in WWI. He served in Libya ,
Italy Italy in the wake of the First World War, Angelo
moved to the United States America America
* * *
In
1945, Paul Tibbets flew the B-29 bomber Enola
Gay for the express purpose of dropping the single largest explosive
ordnance yet known to man, the Atomic bomb. After millions of man-hours of
work, years of research, infrastructure construction, and the creation of new
and unheard of technological advances, the scientists in Los Alamos , New Mexico Germany
On
August 6, 1945, Tibbets found himself on a similar mission, but free of much of
the danger he and his fellow bomber crewmen faced early in the war. His B-29
flew higher and faster than anything the Japanese employed. It was the
uncontested master of the skies in the Pacific and had been for much of 1945. The Japanese Army still controlled enormous
swaths of land, still held millions of slave laborers in a state of starvation,
and after weeks of unrelenting bombing by the B-29, still refused to surrender.
That morning Paul Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay dropped a bomb that
produced heat found only on the surface of the Sun on the people of Hiroshima , Japan
Every day,
a pacifist, believing that it is morally right to accept slavery, mass murder,
and tyranny, calls Paul Tibbets a psychopath, a cog in a conspiracy of morally
ambiguous violence, and a mass murderer. I would only tell that person that
when they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, their family and
friends subject to the whims of madmen, they should consider that were there
more men like Paul Tibbets, madmen would find no quarry and far fewer
victims.
-- Daniel P. Roberts
[1]
Deborah Dwork, Voices and Views: A
History of the Holocaust (Madison : University of Wisconsin
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