No smoke, fire, or truth in anti-war book

This article is posted on the "Pajamas Media" site. It discusses a new book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation by Nicholson Baker, to be published in the UK next month.

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.

Comments

[Gavin]

There is even a trivial parallel between the "Merchants of Death" theory about the origins of the World Wars and the 9/11 Counterfactual Conspiracy theorists. Senator Gerald Nye was an isolationist politician and chairman of the US Senate Committee which investigated the role of the arms industry in WW1 in the mid-thirties. When he was told about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (ironically enough during an 'American First' rally in Pittsburgh), he initially refused to believe it and suspected it was a hoax. At least his state of denial only lasted a matter of hours in that instance.

[Mikey]

"Human Smoke is a trivial, tendentious, ignorant, and more than moderately disgusting work..."

Stop sitting on the fence. Tell us what you really think.

[Lee]

Written in 1925 at the outbreak of WW1? Do you mean 1915, or am I missing something important?

[Lee]

Ah, I'm failing to read properly. My mistake.

[Barry Larking]

"The most generous thing you can say about Baker’s thesis is that it is not of his own devising."

Indeed it is not. I have long awaited revisionist history of the Second World War (1942-45) from across the Atlantic to re-assert itself. Mr Baker's view's were once common in certain political circles in the USA. Evenso, he might just have done everyone a favour. I am encouraged that a certain realism is coming back into the study of the war and its origins and that many will be surprised to learn that Britain was not popular in the US even during the Blitz and there was no enthusiasm there before Pearl Harbor to support her, the last nation left in the field to fight against European fascism.

America First and the even more airbrushed out of history German American Bund organisations are overdue for reappraisal. Yet it is shameful to have to say this sort of thing when one has seen the graves of so many young Americans who fought and died for something better. Let Mr Baker answer one question: Would the world have been better or worse if Hitler had won?

[Oliver Kamm]

Lee, I realise now that my phrasing, while technically correct, is easy to misread. I should therefore have said it more clearly, this way. Sir Edward Grey was Foreign Secretary at the outset of WWI; he wrote those words in retrospect, in 1925.

[Thomas]

Viktor Frankl seems to have secured a measure of inner purpose or joy from his holocaust experience.

Of course it doesn't follow from this that suffering is a desirable route to that end, or that the Allies were wrong to fight the Nazis.

[David Duff]

Does anyone know of a modern, that is, post WWII, biography of Sir Edward Grey? I have 'googled my way up the Amazon' to no avail but one can never under-estimate my incompetence in such matters. All tips gratefully received.

[SteveF]

David, there is:

Keith Robbins - Sir Edward Grey: A Biography of Lord Grey of Falloden (1971).

Not sure how widely available it is though.

[David Duff]

SteveF - thank you very much and I'm sure the always excellent abebooks will find me a copy. Incidentally, apropos this particular post, Keith Robbins also wrote:

"The Abolition of War: The "Peace Movement" in Britain, 1914-1919".

I've never heard of Keith Robbins's work but he has a fascinating range of subjects to his credit so I might splash out on some more of his stuff. Once again, thanks, Steve.

[Alcuin]

Oliver's critique is thorough and convincing. I would just like to qualify this remark of Baker's because it throws an interesting light on current mores: "Churchill and Roosevelt are fingered for having made sly (and sometimes not so sly) anti-Semitic insinuations."

Assuming for the purpose of argument that this is true, I am sure that both men would have sheltered Jews, even at great personal risk, were they in flight for their lives. This highlights the poor quality of the current debate on racism and anti-Semitism. While disdaining Jews as people and wanting them all dead are both unpleasant anti-Semitic thoughts, there is a world of difference between them which is far too often trivialised, particularly by the "We are all Hezbollah now" naifs.

[KB]

Pedant mode: it sould be "suffering voluntarily undergone". The misquote you currently have conveys the opposite of the intended meaning.

[Ariel]

Off topic but has antisemitic ever meant anything other than hatred/disdain for Jews? E.g. anti-Arab as some people seem to claim since Arabs and Arabic are of semetic descent.

[Mikey]

Ariel,

Whilst it is true that Arabs are Semites, antisemitism has always referred to anti-Jewish racism. The word antisemitism is widely attributed to Wilhelm Marr who founded the League of Antisemites in 1879.

The charge that some people try and make that Arabs cannot be antisemites as they are Semites themselves is simply nonsense and exposes their ignorance about the history of the word.

Whether the term antisemitism was the correct word for Marr to apply to anti-Jewish racism is neither here nor there, the term was used to mean anti-Jewish racism by Marr and that is the way it is has always been used.

There may also exist a separate debate about whether antisemitism is a form of racism as it assumes that Jews are a race. In fact, it was pointed out by Louis Harap that the word "racists" itself is very modern: "The term is so new that the Second Edition of the unabridged Webster Dictionary does not even contain the word in the body of the book, but only among the special section on "New Words," "added in 1939."

[Lopakhin]

I haven't read the book, but I saw Baker being interviewed on C-Span, and his take on the Japanese entry into World War II was pretty similar - blamed it on the US sanctions (neglecting the fact that the latter were a response to Japan's occupation and war crimes in China) and hinting pretty heavily that he feels that FDR had foreknowledge of Pearl Harbour.

[Ariel]

Thanks Mikey.