A Slight Delay

After reading Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (and Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect, which I’m reading now and will be taking up later this week), I seem to have pacifism on the brain lately. Something occurred to me: Pacifists, like generals, are always ready to fight the last war. Just the same as those who wage war need a degree of creativity and foresight to be effective, so too must the antiwar movement. It isn’t enough to do something because it worked in ‘68; we’re forty years on now, and the same old things aren’t going to be nearly as effective now as they were then.

Worst of all, it seems that so much of the antiwar movement is reactive rather than proactive. We seem to have waited ’til we were already well on the way to mobilization to try to sound the alarm, rather than realizing that the run-up to war, the war itself, and the means by which it’s conducted are all the product of a particular mindset. It seems to me that the odds of a good result would be higher if we’d address that mindset, rather than trying to change the tide this long after the fact.

Nicholson Baker’s latest offering, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization traces the devolution of humanity and human nature as weaponry and tactics evolve. War has never been civilized business, but Baker shows the dizzying speed at which it took on ever more barbaric aspects in the first half of the last century.

There is the same attention to detail in evidence that’s characterized such earlier works as Vox, A Box of Matches, and The Size of Thoughts. Individuals are captured at very specific moments in time, their words and actions rendered in miniature, the better to illuminate the larger picture. Just as important, Baker is not content to simply rehash the same arguments, or perpetuate the same myths, that now pass for received wisdom. Much of the book’s impact derives from the fact that it thrusts generally ignored or forgotten figures like Stefan Zweig or Henry Fosdick into the spotlight, while also not shirking the faults of the narrative’s traditional “heroes,” like FDR and Winston Churchill.

The protagonists and antagonists here are as likely to be ideas as people. Pacifism is presented, more or less unquestioningly, as an a priori good, as are its proponents, among them Zweig, Charles Lindbergh, A.J. Muste, Jeanette Rankin (who has the distinction of being the only person to cast a dissenting vote against both World Wars), Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Lester, and Gandhi. (more…)