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.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In