Moving on, I noticed the NYT has a review of Nicholas Baker's new book, Human Smoke. It occurred to me that I had seen, and flagged to in order to blog, a review of the same book somewhere else. That somewhere else: The NYT. The tenor of the two are, you might say, different. The more recent:
Baker knows he is preaching to readers who already believe that the Nazis were evil, and that the German war machine, including the blitz, was, to say the least, conducted with ruthless carelessness for human life, and that many ordinary Germans were implicated in the Holocaust. It is possible that “Human Smoke” will infuriate those who believe that Churchill was a hero and that war, in all its viciousness, is often the only way to defeat those who declare or threaten war. “Human Smoke” will not be admired by those who argue that methods used to win a war may seem, especially to novelists writing more than 60 years later, impossible to justify. Nonetheless, the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.
I trust the penultimate sentence is self-parodying. Perhaps it's my youth, or the fact I'm feeling acerbic today, but raising issues (at one degree of remove) is not the same as making an argument, nor do I find merit in dramatizing to make one's point; I suspect the only way to make a plausible case for pacifism in the second world war is to hone the small detail, to focus on the merit and virtue of the individual, and under all circumstances avoiding placing the choices of individuals in their broadest context, a point made by the other review:
Mr. Baker’s title, a grim reference to the crematoriums at Auschwitz, effectively demolishes the edifice he tries to construct. Did the war “help anyone who needed help?” Mr. Baker asks in a plaintive afterword. The prisoners of Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald come to mind, as well as untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles. Nowhere and at no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest, in any serious way, how their liberation might have been effected other than by force of arms.
Of course, this does not mean we surrender the ability to make judgments in a time of war (I have observed, on multiple instances, students who are introduced to the idea of just war for the first time assuming, as if naturally, that a war fought for just ends justifies any methods necessary to win). It's a distinction brought out, among other places, in Michael Walzer's article "World War II: Why Was This War Different?" (jstor here) and incorporated into Just and Unjust Wars. The ability to separate causes from conduct is one of the real contributions of the just war tradition, a distinction that appears to be blurred by the book in question. As such, it's not a new argument, or set of considerations which we ought to take up: it's a series of questions which have already been asked and answered.
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