Adam Kirsch’s devastating review in The New York Sun of Nicholson Baker’s new book “Human Smoke” describes the book’s thesis as:
designed to convince the reader that America should not have fought Germany or Japan; that Franklin Roosevelt connived to get us into the war at the behest of the arms manufacturers, and probably knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in advance; that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty buffoon and a protofascist; that in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor; that after the fall of France, Churchill was culpable in vowing to fight on, and not acceding to Hitler’s “peace” terms; that the Holocaust was, at least in part, Hitler’s response to British aggression, and that the only people who demonstrated true wisdom in the run-up to the war were American and British pacifists, who refused to take up arms no matter how pressing the need.
No one who knows about World War II, wrote Kirsch, will take the book seriously, but those “who don’t know enough” will learn to reject even an indisputably just war. The Sun’s editorial page yesterday asked rhetorically why Baker would “want, in the middle of a new world war, to spend his time putting the gloss on the advocates of an appeasement and pacifism that would have handed the world to Hitler without a fight?”
The answer is that arguments about history are frequently arguments about the present. So FDR lied us into World War II; LBJ lied us into
Baker has denied his book is one of moral equivalence, but as the Sun noted, it is “close enough.” Scott Johnson at Power Line called Baker’s “lofty equivalence” the “most prevalent form of degradation in everyday intellectual life.” It may actually be something worse: a form of moral self-congratulation, as Hitler’s heirs advance, about one’s unwillingness to join the side one is on.
UPDATE: Soccer Dad emailed a link to "Carping Sectarian Buchanan Says Stopping Hitler and Tojo Not Worth It." Nicolson Baker probably has a fan in Pat Buchanan. Robert Hessen of the Hoover Institution emailed David Pryce-Jones’ review of Baker’s book in the March issue of Commentary. Both articles are very much worth reading.