Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization
Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke is purportedly a history of world pacifist movements, country by country, which contrasts those pacifist movements with the warmongering of Nazi Germany, the United States and Britain in the pre-war period and early years of the Second World War until the end of 1941.
Baker is strident in his condemnation of then British prime minister Winston Churchill's carpet bombing of German cities, and rightly so.
However, he neglects to mention that after the evacuation of British forces from France (Dunkirk) in 1940, for a considerable time this was the only way the British could carry on the fight against fascism.
When it comes to the US president Franklin Roosevelt, Baker descends into the realms of conspiracy theory, selecting material so that it "proves" Roosevelt had in some way purposely engineered the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, a wearisome canard for anybody who has studied the origins of the Pacific War.
At this distance, we are all aware of the moral equivalence on the Allied side in their conduct of World War II.
Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are always there to remind us the Allies weren't always on the side of the angels, as is the Allies' refusal to assist Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, despite the fact that they were well aware of Nazi genocidal intentions.
Nevertheless, it would have been morally irresponsible, given the nature of the Nazi regime, to adopt the position of Mahatma Gandhi championed by Baker, that the only course of action one could take towards the Nazis was to submit willingly to their violence, even if it required martyrdom.
There are more serious problems with Baker's work, though, if one is to find it useful as a piece of history.
The book is arranged as a chronological progression of extremely well-written vignettes from 1892 onwards, with the majority between 1930 and 1941.
These vignettes are based on newspapers of the period, notably the New York Times and Herald Tribune, and from political memoirs, personal diaries and various other primary sources.
Through these passages, the book covers a wealth of detail on a host of diverse topics as various as German generals grumbling about Hitler's bellicosity, British bombing in Palestine in 1938, the anti-Semitism of the Roosevelts, pacifist socialists in the US and Britain, English and German literary exiles in California, Gandhi's calls for passive resistance to the Nazis and Charles Lindbergh's traitorous espousal of fascism.
They make fascinating reading. But, unfortunately, they are all jumbled together, one after the other, with no organising principle other than date following endless date, to the point that at times, the dates themselves seem like meaningless intrusions into the tale Baker is trying to weave.
One of the tasks of historians is to try to impose some sense on the chaos of the past by interpreting the flow and meaning of events as discovered in surviving documents.
In this, Baker has failed ingloriously. What he presents the reader with instead are several hundred very well-written notes that should have served as the starting point of his work, rather than its end.
Another task is to deal honestly with material that does not fit the hypothesis around which the work is shaped. You can't ignore such material, nor can you distort it.
Baker infers in an afterword that his intention in writing this book was to give US and British pacifists the due they have never received, and that's all well and good.
Unfortunately he tries to contrast the work of these pacifists with the belligerent attitudes of the warmakers. The sad result is that the portraits of Roosevelt and Churchill in particular after a while start to look like they've been drawn from the pages of that Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier, David Irving.
Despite all these strictures there is value in Human Smoke. He presents us with a unique picture of the pacifist movement across the world from 1930 to 1941.
The reader agonises with those German generals who cannot quite pluck up the courage to remove Hitler and admires Gandhi's endless quest for peace through passive resistance. The plight of Japanese pacifists helpless to stop the slide into war with the US evokes deep pity.
While the structure of Human Smoke militates against a picture of any great clarity, Baker still provides a rich portrait of individual pacifists in the US and Britain.
Though, disturbingly, in the US, protagonists for peace were not only the genuine socialist left after June 1941, and other pacifists, but also pro-fascists like the America-Firsters.
[Paul Burns is a historian living in Armidale, NSW. He is a member of Socialist Alliance and is the author of The Brisbane Line Controversy: Political Opportunism versus National Security, 1942-45.]