by Nicholson Baker
566pp, Simon & Schuster, £20
This book consists of hundreds of vignettes, arranged in chronological order, which provide a composite picture of the world sliding into the abyss of Hitler's war. One item features Nazi stormtroopers letting off stink bombs in a cinema showing the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930; another cites Frank Lloyd Wright's 1940 opinion that the bombing of Europe is a blessing since it will enable architects to start again; yet another records how in 1941 Russian aircraft dropped Christmas cards on the invaders depicting fields of crosses topped with German helmets over the caption, "Living space in the East". Nicholson Baker's snippets come from a variety of printed sources, including diaries, letters, historical accounts and contemporary newspapers, especially the New York Times. And their singular purpose is, as his afterword confirms, to show that American and British pacifists were right to oppose the war.
Theirs was an unfashionable cause during their own time despite Baker's assertion that in 1925 "most of the world was pacifist". This was not so: what gave a fillip to the pacifist movement was the anti-war literature of the late 20s and the prospect of another global conflict during the 30s. Even then, pacifists had only a marginal influence, partly because few of them believed in their own creed. Most wanted international disarmament and collective security, and they were prepared to resist when faced by aggression. As Gandhi said, they espoused their cause "with the mental reservation that when pacifism fails, arms might be used". Yet the Mahatma himself acknowledged (in 1938) that if there could be a justifiable war it would be fought against Germany to prevent the persecution of the Jews. It was, indeed, the enormity of Hitler's crimes and the impossibility of stopping him with anything less than brute force that discredited pacifism.
Here Baker becomes especially interesting and provocative, standing this argument on its head and trying to demonstrate that the very horrors of Nazism vindicated the pacifist position. His model is Gandhi, who thought that non-violence was most efficacious when violence was most terrible. And Baker's case is summed up by Christopher Isherwood, who, on July 8 1940, engaged in a lunchtime dispute with Thomas Mann's son, Klaus. The latter said that pacifists, by giving the Nazis free rein, would permit civilisation to be annihilated. Isherwood answered with Aldous Huxley's point: "Civilisation dies anyhow of blood poisoning the moment it takes up its enemies' weapons and exchanges crime for crime." Baker's contention is that when people fight fascism they descend to its moral level. By killing in cold blood as many as possible of their own species who have never offended them, as Swift said, they shed their humanity and become as feral as their foes.
Much of Baker's book seems designed to expose the ethical equivalence between the democracies and the dictatorships. The former condemned Nazi antisemitism but, at the international conference at Evian in July 1938, refused to accept its victims as refugees, prompting a German newspaper headline: "Jews for sale: Who wants them? No one." Franklin Roosevelt's pleas that the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of the guilty appear as consummate hypocrisy when set beside his implacable prosecution of hostilities after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, which Baker represents as the outrage that the president had long sought to provoke in order to enter the war. Winston Churchill earns opprobrium as an admirer of Mussolini and a militant imperialist who advocated the use of poison gas on "recalcitrant natives" and "uncivilised tribes".
Churchill, almost as much as Hitler, is the villain of Baker's book because he championed "an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers on the Nazi homeland". Here Baker is on more familiar ground. At the time, Bishop Bell of Chichester and others bravely denounced the immorality of airborne attacks on civilians, an indictment that grew more telling as Allied bombing became increasingly accurate and destructive later in the war. Yet after Dunkirk Churchill had no other means of retaliating against Hitler, even though, as emerged in 1941, the RAF could only hit military targets with one bomb in a hundred - one bomber group based in Yorkshire mistook the Thames for the Rhine and dropped its bombs near Cambridge. Moreover Churchill, though ruthless, was not heartless. Watching a film about air raids on Germany, he exclaimed: "Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?"
Baker prefers to note Goebbels's comment on a photograph of Churchill: "This man walks over dead bodies to satisfy his blind and presumptuous personal ambition." Baker also includes cameos which suggest, incorrectly, that Churchill was antisemitic. For example, he quotes from an essay in Churchill's 1937 book Great Contemporaries which identified the malign Trotsky by his race: "'He was a Jew,' wrote Churchill with finality. 'He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.'" But Baker omits the context. Churchill was explaining that Trotsky's Jewishness was an obstacle to his becoming autocrat of Communist Russia, and he criticised "so narrow-minded a reason".
Other bits of Baker's collage are misleading. Details are wrong, and there is a muddle over when in 1939 Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty. An uninformed reader would infer from two items that Hitler was responsible for the burning of the Reichstag. Mass Observation is said to be the government's public opinion sampling service, whereas it was a private quasi-anthropological enterprise which the authorities deemed leftwing and subversive. Of course, Baker is an American novelist, not a British historian. But unfortunately this is also reflected in his mode of writing, which is not joined up. He presents us with a disparate sequence of epiphanies, some very striking, rather than a coherent thesis. His book is a diversified mosaic, a tessellated pavement without cement.
The reason for this, perhaps, is that fragments of idealism carry more conviction than a systematic justification of pacifism in the age of the dictators. Thus Baker makes much of a fable enshrined in John Haynes Holmes's play If This Be Treason (1935). It tells how a pacifist American president ignores cries of vengeance after a surprise Japanese attack on the US fleet and flies unarmed to seek peace, whereupon the Japanese people revolt non-violently against their militaristic leaders and restore amity. But Baker fails to admit that pacifists could only survive in a liberal society, secured by what Kipling called the "uniforms that guard you while you sleep". He does not say how the Nazis would have dealt with the Indian Congress: Hitler told Lord Halifax that he would shoot Gandhi first and then his supporters in batches.
Finally, Baker refuses to acknowledge that submitting to violence is in itself a form of wickedness because it assists the triumph of tyranny. As George Orwell said in 1941, his contemporaries had to choose between two evils: "You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil." The lesser evil was to fight. Paradoxically, though, there is no denying the moral courage and noble purpose of many conscientious objectors. Baker represents them well in this high-minded, wrong-headed book.
· Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is published by Cape