Human Smoke

A brief take from my blog Near Earth Object:

I’ve just read Nicholson Baker’s take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been fought, and that Churchill and Roosevelt were as bad as Hitler. This leads to a pretty much categorical dismissal of the entire work. Here’s a bit from the New York Times review:

Muddled and often infuriating, “Human Smoke” sounds its single, solemn note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over. War is bad. Churchill was bad. Roosevelt was bad. Hitler was bad too, but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill. Jeannette Rankin, a Republican congresswoman from Montana, was good, because she cast the lone vote opposing a declaration of war against Japan. It was Dec. 8, 1941.

[ . . . :]

Almost unbelievably, Baker includes multiple instances in which Churchill and Roosevelt rejected the idea of negotiating with Hitler. Although he offers no commentary on the matter, the reader is forced to draw the conclusion that negotiation was a sensible idea cavalierly tossed aside by leaders who preferred war to peace.

As “the reader” in this instance, I at no time felt “forced” to draw any such conclusion, nor any other proffered by this and other similar criticisms. If I felt that the book’s central message was so naively simplistic, I would likewise dismiss it.

What the book does do is to remind us that the events of World War II were not black and white, that Churchill and Roosevelt were not utterly pure and heroic in their motives or executions, and that there was a legitimate anti-war sentiment that pulsated at the time–one that was as well-intended and as based in honest principle as any opponent of, say, the Iraq invasion in 2003 (putting aside whether the opponents of battling Hitler were in that sentiment correct, which I think history bares out that they were not). The principled pacifists of that era deserve to have their story told, stories seldom told–how many World War II histories can you think of that feature Gandhi as a central figure and moral voice?

The book also reminds us, very often through primary sources such as diaries and direct quotes, how removed those waging war can be from those suffering unspeakably from its horrors. The prime ministers, presidents, ambassadors and generals often seem heartless and utterly out of touch in regards to the real world consequences of the war’s mass butchery of human beings.

Yes, Baker shows us the often-bloodthirsty and callous sides of Churchill and Roosevelt, but this aspect of such a giant figures needs to be aired, needs to be remembered. It is important that we are reminded that throughout history the good guys are not always good–a lesson which, to this reader, only made the bad guys seem even worse. As jaw-dropping as some of the Allies’ actions and sentiments were, the acts of the Nazi regime as recounted by Baker were so horrific, so awful, so monstrous, that Churchill at his worst never approaches the evil of Hitler.

Baker makes that very distinction clear without having to say it explicitly. Baker gives us the real human beings as they were in this chapter of the human story, and does not need to explain that, yes, of course, Hitler was far worse than any Allied leader. Perhaps some folks, still oversensitive and over-reverent of certain persons and eras, just need it spelled out more plainly, and have the same versions of history fed to them on slightly different spoons each time.

A collection of vignettes — some only a paragraph long, few longer than a page — of episodes from the years leading up to the second World War, and then from the years of the war itself up through 1941. Baker mostly leaves his own voice out of it, except for a few paragraphs of “afterword” at the end.

The book generated a lot of heat when it was released a few months ago because it challenges the idea that World War II was a “good” war, something that is today an article of faith for all decent civilized people.

World War II is so revered these days, with all of the “greatest generation” fooferaw, politicians trying to get themselves compared to Churchill, and the like, that people have come to have a weird nostalgia for the period as if it were the high point of civilization, when in fact it was very much the opposite.

The greatest generation gave us the greatest failure of civilization the world has ever seen, resulting in the deaths of millions, the development of the technology of genocide, the normalization of a military policy of barbarity towards civilians, and ending with a gargantuan communist terror-state crushing much of Europe and Asia and, along with the United States, threatening the world with nuclear annihilation.

The only thing that might have been worse would have been if the Axis powers had won. Ay, there’s the rub. And that sentiment has been the quick and potent retort to anyone who questions the article of faith.

Baker isn’t satisfied with this: “My feelings about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the received version.”

The defenders of the received version were quick to respond. In the New York Times, a reviewer said:

Did the war “help anyone who needed help?” Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.

But in fact, with few exceptions, the prisoners of Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald were not liberated by the war — they were murdered during the course of it. And Baker does suggest, in many places in the book, how many opportunites to aid and rescue Jewish refugees and “untold millions” of suffering Europeans, were squandered — indeed, actively discouraged or forbidden — by the Allies in pursuit of their war aims or other policies.

Much of the criticism of Baker’s book is similarly knee-jerk. Some borders on paranoid — ascribing to Baker opinions and assertions that he never explicitly makes, but finding them implicit in his constellation of vignettes. Baker invites this sort of thing by muting his own voice and leaving the interpretation of his examples (and his choices of what examples to include) to the reader. I think Baker probably deliberately chose to suggest controversial things in this way that he felt afraid to or unable to defend explicitly, which is too bad, but his critics see this as a license to invent straw man arguments to attack, which is also too bad. Someone called the book “a 500-page Rorschach Test,” which hits the nail on the head.

The callousness to the plight of Jewish refugees is one of the themes of the selections Baker chose. Other themes that receive prominent play include:

the evolution of the policy of attacks on the civilian population, particularly by the Allies — largely aerial bombardments, but also chemical & biological warfare and starvation blockades

that these attacks on the civilian population, sold as a method for demoralizing and weakening the enemy, most frequently did just the opposite, and served mainly to slake a thirst for bloody revenge on the part of the attackers

the efforts of various pacifist groups to encourage negotiation, inoculate against war fever, and assist refugees and other war victims

the evolution of the “final solution” as the war escalated, with the implication (I think) that the Nazis became more savage toward their victims the more they themselves felt the savagery of the war

* the surprising (to me) extent to which the United States was engaging in war against the Axis powers prior to the Pearl Harbor attack and the formal declaration of war

The book is a powerful, captivating, relentless read. It has flaws — Baker’s aforementioned editorial stand-offishness; an unseemly amount of naïveté, particularly when it comes to being shocked and surprised (or worse, credulous) at politicians’ hypocritical platitudes or at the commonplace racism of the period; and a largely United States-centric view of the war. Still, it’s an eye-opener, and a good remedy for anyone who’s had a poisonous dose of History Channel.