Sherry Chandler

Truer, sadder, stranger

Nicholson Baker has written a pacifist history of World War II called Human Smoke. The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster). Here is an excerpt of his interview with Charles McGrath in the NYTimes:

“I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American education.” Mr. Baker said, “and I was surprised to discover that Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve — he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.”

He added: “I’ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if you’re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to answer the question: Did the Allies’ response to Hitler really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete overlap.”

Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr. Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses and rub his eyes, and then he went on: “What are you going to do when Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? 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.”

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Alfred Nobel, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of Lay Down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World’s Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

William Grimes wants none of it.

But I look at the troubled aftermath of WWII and wonder if there might have been another way.

We have been watching Terry Jones’ Barbarians, which though it may be couched in commercial bombast nevertheless leaves me feeling a bit less than sanguine about the glories of western civilization.

See Lance Mannion: It’s not serious foreign policy if it doesn’t kill people.

Possibly related posts:

It’s Hiroshima Day

Extraordinary laureate

Naguib Mahfouz

Elitists, populists, demagogues and poseurs

Some things never change

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