IN THE Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago, the middlebrow American eclecticist
and historian Mark Kurlansky told his readers that a new piece of writing
“may be one of the most important books you will ever read”. The work was
Human Smoke, by the novelist Nicholson Baker, a factual venture into the
origins of the Second World War. Human Smoke, Kurlansky said, demonstrated
“that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in
modern history”.
Kurlansky was not talking about Hitler and his various inventions or
provocations that permitted him to occupy several neighbouring states. The
lies, according to Kurlansky, were told by the leaders of the democracies,
especially Roosevelt and Churchill. Baker had shown, “step by step, how an
alliance dominated by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to
communism than to fascism, obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight
coerced the world into war”.
In fact Baker's book does not “show” or “demonstrate” anything in particular
about the causes of the war, consisting, as it does, of hundreds of snippets
of speech, diary extracts and single lines from newspaper reports, combined
into a chronological narrative. He dedicates the book to the memory of US
and British pacifists. “They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe,
reconcile the United States and Japan and stop the war from happening. They
failed, but they were right.”
The opponents of Baker's world view were, primarily, men such as Roosevelt and
Churchill, who came to regard armed conflict with fascism as practically
inevitable. In Human Smoke Churchill emerges as an all-weather warmonger
with a penchant for bombing civilians, his bloodthirstiness made worse by
the superb rhetoric in which it was couched. This is exactly the Churchill
depicted by Goebbels and Stalinist propagandists. It is, of course, partly
true. It is also substantially untrue.
I was slightly surprised that, when he was in London last month, Baker agreed
to meet me. I thought that his publishers might have warned him about a
possible hostility towards his underlying thesis. But Baker, 6ft4in, florid,
white-haired and tweedy, was courteous and brave. I liked him a lot.
Why had he written this book? “We can all agree that Hitler was the worst guy
ever born, but I had a puzzlement at the West's response.” He means that he
was puzzled at the West's belligerence towards Hitler. He felt that the
proximity of war brought the worst leaders - the “sabre-rattlers” - to the
fore. “Then I had the Iraq war. I was in Washington when the Pentagon was
flown into. I said, ‘I just hope we're not bombing some place any time
soon'.”
Baker denies believing that there is a moral equivalence between the Axis and
the Allies. But the Second World War was constantly used against modern
peace movements as “the grand counter-example, the war that had to be
fought”, and he questions whether that is true.
Was he saying that America shouldn't have supported Britain with military aid
in 1940? Not with bombers, he replied. There were good opportunities for
peace with Hitler that might have avoided the suffering of the war - and
even meant no Holocaust. “Let's just go to 1940. We reach agreement and see
what happens. It allows the refugees to escape. Potentially things happen in
Germany which are more to our liking. There were moderate factions around
Hitler who were deeply distressed by his irrational urges. Things could have
changed in Germany.
“During the Second World War there's the greatest state-run programme of
extermination ever. And I think you just have to look at the fact that those
two things are co-terminous.” In other words, Churchill's obduracy and
Roosevelt's war hunger gave rise to the conditions in which Hitler could
murder the Jews.
“Why the fuck was the war fought? Why? It wasn't a war to help the Jews, it
was fought instead of helping the Jews. It was easier to raise massive
armies and air forces than to lift quotas.”
I pointed out that Hitler had long been determined to extinguish Bolshevism
and occupy large parts of the Soviet Union - with the millions of Jews
living there. There was, Baker agreed, “a fantasy” of conquering Russia.
“But what turns a megalomaniac's fantasy into something a whole state
mechanism supports? The stress and distortions and witnessed ruin of war
becomes the umbrella under which radicalism shelters.”
Me: “We couldn't have lived in the Europe that would have been created by not
resisting Hitler in that way.”
Baker: “It's easy to think of Hitler as a perpetual motion machine, a man who
is not a man, but an evil force that will live for ever. But he was a sick
man. He had a tremor. His life span would have been short. But let's say he
would have lived till 85, I can't imagine that a Germany at peace, a
prosperous Germany, would have tolerated a loutish, hate-filled leader for
long.”
Me: “Isn't the truth that the Germany that emerges from the war is better than
the Germany that went into it?”
Baker: “The notion that a regime is more democratic than a horrific
dictatorial regime is, of course, of interest, but the fact is that millions
of people died, cities were laid waste...”
So, taking the case of US opposition to Japanese action in China, I said that
I am glad that the Americans helped the Chinese. There was a pause. “I guess
we have a fundamental disagreement. The Japanese bombing of the Chinese
cities was avoidable.
“The Japanese wanted to occupy Manchuria. If they had simply occupied
Manchuria, those people wouldn't have died. What action would have involved
the least amount of suffering? The bombing of London was one of the most
horrible things that could possibly have happened.”
I told the agreeable Mr Baker that I would far rather have seen St Paul's and
every historic church in the country blown up than live for 25 years under
fascism. “That's when it gets close to that Churchillian noble-sounding
rhetoric,” Baker replied. It was a moment of mutual incomprehension.
You have, I think, to feel very strongly about Iraq and George W.Bush to need
to construct a world in which all the Jews would have gone to Madagascar, or
Tanganyika, there to dwell in peace; Nazi Germany would have run Europe,
mellowing out with prosperity and conquest and somehow avoiding war with
Russia; Hitler would have died early to be replaced by some cuddlier
transitional figure; and in the Pacific Japan would have enjoyed its
dominion over its hemisphere. Which would have been tough for the Chinese,
but then, when was it not tough for the Chinese?
Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
Simon & Schuster, £20; 576pp Buy
the book here
