Vox Nova at the Library: Human Smoke
Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of WWII and the End of Civilization is a haunting and sometimes horrifying revisionist look at the lead up to and early years of the Second World War. The book is composed entirely of small vignettes (ranging in length from a paragraph to a few pages) drawn from newspaper accounts, diaries, memoirs, official documents, and other largely contemporary sources. While this style leaves little room for direct argumentation, the main theses of the book are fairly clear and may be summarized as follows:
1. The Allies during WWII (particularly Britain) engaged in numerous atrocities, violations of civil liberties, etc. during the war, and in some cases did so before the Germans.
2. The leaders of the Allied powers (particularly FDR and Churchill) wanted war, and in the case of FDR did everything in his power to provoke an attack.
3. That the Allied powers didn’t particularly care about the Jews, and that the Holocaust could have been averted had the United States and Britain allowed Jews to immigrate as refugees (something which was considered but rejected).
4. That Hitler was a madman in the literal sense of the term.
The last claim undercuts any claim that WWII could have been avoided through negotiation or compromise, but the first three do a lot to knock the shine off of the so-called good war.
There are no heroes in this book. Baker is himself a pacifist, and writes with some sympathy about some of the pacifist leaders, but he is forced to admit that the great majority of the anti-war movement at the time were not acting out of noble motives, but were either Soviet sympathizers (prior to the German invasion of Russia), or antisemitic isolationists.
I can’t say I enjoyed this book (it’s not that kind of book). But it was quite informative and has changed my perspective on things somewhat.
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This book did not meet many kind reviewers in the press. The LA Times gave an especially harsh, and unfair, appraisal. But Baker’s been doing good work for a long time before this. Check the online archives of the New York Review of Books for more of it. There’s a great article he wrote recently about Wikipedia.
I would be quick to rise to the defense of WWII as a good war but let me for now just deal with the suggestion that the Holocaust could have been averted as claimed.
The idea of receiving Jewish refugees after the war started is a hard case to make. With the Nazi invasion of Poland and the declaration of war by Britain and France, millions of Jews were caught behind Nazi lines with really no way of rescuing large numbers of them. These made up the greatest numbers of those murdered in the Shoah.
As for pre-war (and pre-Final Solution) German Jews, between 2/3rds and 3/4ths of them were evacuated from Germany (probably the lower number as, again tragically, a number who left then returned). This was one of the largest evacuations in history. Tens of thousands were received by Britain in the midst of high domestic unemployment. In comparison, only 200 Christian Armenians were received by the UK during the Armenian genocide and only 700 Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks were admitted, even though Britain had a Tory government at the time and the King was cousin to the Czar.
Most likely those who remained in Germany were not willing to leave, mostly elderly or those in mixed marriages. And again, tragically, many of those who fled were received by France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Norway and the Low Countries, only to again come under Nazi rule following the invasion and defeat of those nations.
The finest examination of the question of the number of Jews caught in the shoah is William Rubinstein’s THE MYTH OF RESCUE.
Among other things, he points out that many Jews left and then returned. Then he continues to point out that many Jews left for France and Czechoslovakia and Poland and other European countries, and were trapped when the Nazis conquered those countries.
I note also that Hitler may have been a madman [einer Naturcatastroph] but he was the legally elected head of the country.