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“Just Give Peace a Chance?”

Hitchens’ review of Nicholas Baker’s Human Smoke. The title of the book is a reference to the smoke from the crematoriums of the Nazi death camps. To be a little lazy, here’s a quote that pretty much sums up Baker’s argument:

Follow Baker’s logic...and it becomes possible to imply that the war might actually have helped facilitate the Holocaust. This…would help make all participants in the Second World War into morally equivalent forces. And that in fact is Baker’s view, as is the view not just that all wars are essentially the same, but that they are also all essentially part of the same war. What we call the Second World War was only an extension of the long struggle for mastery between the various European powers, all of which were all the time also wreaking indiscriminate cruelty on colonial peoples.

Hitchens goes on to systematically and clearly debunk each of Bakers assertions. With a final frequently Hitchens comment about baker’s thesis, “This will not do.”

Great essay, definitely will not read the book.

General Franz Halder with Hitler in 1942. Halder was the German Chief of Staff but spent the last year of the war in Dachau (and several other camps) for being dis-loyal to Hitler. He used the term "Human Smoke" in his memoirs:

New Learning: In an open letter to the British people on July 3, 1940, Gandhi wrote: “Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”

Hitchens rightly comments, “This is not the book’s only reminder of how fatuous the pacifist position can sound, or indeed can be.”

New word: none!...a first!