War is never the answer

That's the message of Nicholson Baker's book, Smoke, which lays the blame for World War II on Winston Churchill, Roosevelt and the Chinese (they drove the Japanese to violence), among others.

Does Baker really believe that? Or is he using World War II as a stand in for Iraq? In a riposte to an unfavorable review in the NY Sun, Baker argues:

Nobody expects a man like Adolf Hitler to do the right thing — he was a rage-prone, vengeful, suicidal madman. I do think, though, that we might legitimately and fruitfully question, as Herbert Hoover did at the time, the good sense and compassion of two of the leaders whom we now hold up as saviors of civilization.

Whatever you may believe about the advisability of the Battle of Iraq, surely you will concede that it isn't perverse to try to wring from the catastrophe of World War II some balm of moderating wisdom and instruction.

The writer of the Sun's response has it right.

On the eve of American entry into the Battle of Iraq, Nicholson Baker was one of those Slate magazine queried in respect of where they stood. Wrote Mr. Baker: "We can keep it from happening. What slowed the bombing in Vietnam? The shouts of the protesters in front of the White House, disturbing Nixon's tranquility. Public embarrassment stopped it. Heap shame and opprobrium on Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Bush. They are foolish, small-minded, cowardly men who will not hesitate to order the bombing of civilians from several miles in the air in order to squash a dictator that they helped bring to power." We are mere newspapermen, not psychoanalysts. But our guess is that Mr. Baker knew when he wrote those words that Bush and Cheney had seized the esprit of Churchill and Roosevelt and that one way to get at them would be to tarnish the heroes of the earlier war.

Smoke is reviewed here, here and here.

The Rape of Nanking

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking.

The Japanese have been downplaying the Nanking atrocities since the siege of the city began; Japanese journalists following the Imperial army wrote dispatches about the valorous deeds of their soldiers. Japanese textbooks were heavily censored,leading to a lawsuit by Japanese professor that took 32 years to resolve.

So, grudgingly, the Japanese have begun to acknowledge their sordid past.

Meanwhile, here in the US we've also had a change in outlook about our past.

The massacres are rarely mentioned at any length in most modern books I read recounting the origins of the Second World War,

... it is common to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war ...

or by my students, when they enumerate the causes of American entry into the Second World War, but rising American determination to stop Japanese aggression in Chine spiked sharply when news of the massacres reached the United States. It is more common than it used to be to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner, leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war, and it’s much less common than it used to be to hear about what moved American opinion to push Japan so hard. Japanese rightists explain government-backed Chinese interest in the Rape of Nanking as a cynical excuse for mobilizing nationalist sentiment. This may be true, but Japanese inability to face the fairly recent past is at least as remarkable as widespread Chinese interest in a crime of such magnitude. What is more remarkable yet is that although the numbers murdered in Nanking may be the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima bombings, no phrasemakers describe the horrors of the twentieth century as those of “the age of Auschwitz and Nanking.” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” however, has become a familiar yoking of crimes. The politics of historical memory has in recent decades been a popular topic in my profession. Oddly enough, the people who profess the greatest interest in it seem likeliest to have the most imprecise and wispy memories of the Rape of Nanking.

‘Nicely done, Mr. Chamberlain Baker’

Via Stephen Spruiell.