I decided to take a break from atheism-related books for a day and turn back to World War Two. I bought Human Smoke years ago when I still had some vestiges of pacifism from my Mennonite upbringing. I wanted to see if there were any good pacifist arguments against the war, but Human Smoke provided none. Instead it provided a huge number of out of context quotes and incidents that generally placed the blame for the war on Great Britain and America. There were so many things wrong with this book that it is difficult to know where to start except to say that it is very easy to prove any point you want when you only use carefully selected snippets, and even easier when you provide a bibliography but absolutely no in-text citations to show where your quotes and anecdotes are from. Baker's style of using these snippets with no personal interpretation allows him to portray the book as being an unbiased look at just the facts, but his failure to examine all of the facts quickly shows his biases. Overall, Human Smoke is designed to give the impression that the Allies were the true mass butchers of the war, while the Germans only hurt the Jews and truly wanted peace and the Japanese were dragged into a war against their will after barely harming anyone. All of this is of course completely ludicrous.
I will start by looking at Baker's perspective that the war was the fault of the Allies, specifically Churchill and Roosevelt. Baker provides huge numbers of quotes to show that Churchill and Roosevelt were both eager to get into the war against the Axis. All of this is true, they did want to get into the war, but this eagerness and their work towards it does not mean that it was wrong for those countries to go to war. Quite the contrary, as I will look at below. Frequently throughout the book Baker tries to paint a picture that Germany and Japan did not want to get into the war, but that they were pushed into it by the Allies. Bakers claim that the German high command had no taste for war is bullshit, what they had no taste for was the idea that a corporal would take their power and lead a war. They were perfectly happy both when Hitler was rearming them and when the Germans were initially successful in the war. The crowning moment of Baker's willful blindness comes when he states that Hitler's peace offer to Great Britain just after conquering France was the dictator's "last appeal to reason." Painting Hitler as a man of reason who badly wanted peace that Britain wouldn't give him is not only factually incorrect, it is disgusting. Baker is equally bad when discussing the Japanese. He claims through his selective quotations that the Japanese had no taste for war with the United States because they didn't want war at all, when the truth is that they didn't want to fight the Americans because they were not certain that they could win. His claim that the American oil embargo on Japan forced Japan to attack the United States is correct on the surface, but he ignores the atrocities in China that Japan had been using that oil to perpetrate. He further claims that the Japanese navy ignored the "provocation" of American oil tankers sailing past them to Russia but leaves the impression that they did so because they didn't want war, not because attacking those tankers would have been a strategically idiotic move to make.
Another of Baker's major faults in Human Smoke is his wholehearted acceptance of the naivete of pacifism, specifically Gandhi's brand of it. His frequent mention of Gandhi gives the impression that satyagraha would have worked, when it clearly would not have. Gandhi's brand of resistance is extremely effective, but only when directed at a society that is unwilling to engage in mass slaughter. The British were willing to imprison tens of thousands of resisters, fire upon demonstrators, and kill some innocent people, but under no circumstances would they have rounded up thousands of resisters and executed them on the spot. Having that line meant that Gandhi's protest could be successful because the British were eventually pushed to a point where they either had to cross the line or give in to India's demands. Under no circumstances would that have worked against Hitler or the Japanese who both showed that they had no problems with rounding up and murdering people by the thousands in full view of the world. Another major flaw with Baker's use of pacifist arguments is that he seems to think that war could have been avoided if only Britain had made peace with Germany or the United States had disarmed and been friendly towards the Japanese. It is true that had the Allies done these things the Second World War as we know it would not have happened. Instead, the Germans would have swept through Europe and Africa with little resistance and would likely have had enough resources to push back against Russia, finishing their Final Solution, enslaving the Slavs of Eastern Europe, and setting up an empire that would have been unequaled in the world. The Japanese would have been able to continue their march through Asia unabated raping and slaughtering as they went. The point is that Britain and America becoming pacifist nations wouldn't have saved lives, it would just have exposed different lives to death (and probably more of them). Baker seems also to ignore that Chamberlain tried the peaceful approach before the war began but all that did was encourage Hitler to keep going. Had the Allies stepped in to enforce the Versailles Treaty or if they had put their feet down to stop the Anschluss or the invasion of Czechoslovakia the war in Europe might have been over before it began. It is remarkable how seldom Baker shows actual proof of pacifist actions by German or Japanese citizens the way he does British or American. Clearly this is because such actions were extremely rare despite Baker's claims that those countries really only wanted peace. Baker's portrayal of pacifism in Human Smoke does no more than convince me that when applied on a national scale (as opposed to individually with conscientious objectors) it is a position of profound selfishness. Those pacifists clamoring for the American government to disarm and stop the Japanese embargo or stop the Lend-Lease program and make peace with Hitler were doing no more than saying that so long as they didn't have to die or kill it was perfectly alright for other people that they would never meet to die instead.
Finally, I want to look at another theme that runs through Human Smoke, that of the Allies as butchers. It is completely true that the Allies committed what can only be termed atrocities, as it is that Churchill was a profoundly bad peacetime leader who bungled the handling of Indian independence and often acted with savagery. It remains true however that regardless of the bad decisions made and atrocities committed during the war, not having gone to war would have been undoubtedly worse for the world as a whole. The choice was not, as Baker implies towards the beginning of the book, between accepting Churchill's decisions and having war or rejecting them and not. The choice was between accepting the decisions of a flawed leader and having a war that in the end stopped Nazism and Japanese imperialism and rejecting the war and allowing the horrors of Hitler and Hirohito to run rampant over the world.
Baker ends the book by saying that the pacifists of the 1940s "failed, but they were right." I would rephrase that to say that they failed because of their ludicrous level of naivete about human nature and how the world works. Pacifism is a great concept that fails as soon as the other guy isn't a pacifist and but is content to let you sit there spouting your platitudes while he slaughters others. I'm not sure that I can really recommend Human Smoke, but it was certainly interesting to see how easy it is to put together a revisionist history that is on the surface supported by carefully chosen facts.
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