http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/31/AR2008033102149.html?hpid=opinionsbox1Yes, It Was a Good War
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 1, 2008; Page A17
Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled "Human Smoke." It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war -- our supposedly "good" war -- was not good at all. We shouldn't have fought it.
To my mind, the book is dead wrong and very odd. This, though, has not stopped it from getting a respectable front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review -- "It may be one of the most important books you will ever read," wrote Mark Kurlansky -- or from grabbing the bottom perch (No. 15) on the New York Times's important bestseller list. Baker's a hit.
It takes a fair amount of audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom about World War II. This is especially the case since the war has become conflated with the Holocaust, the evil of which cannot possibly be argued. If you throw in the atrocities committed by the Japanese -- everything from massacres to the conscription of local women in conquered territories as sex slaves -- then World War II not only seemed right and urgent at the time but right and a bit too late now. Hitler could have been stopped earlier.
Baker, though, is a pacifist. He dedicated his book to the memory of "American and British pacifists" who, he writes, never really got their due. "They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."
No, they were not. But that, for the moment, is beside the point. A contemporary context for Baker's book may not be World War II but the war in Iraq. The former, of course, is the good war, and the latter is the bad one, but in Baker's view they undoubtedly are both wars that made things worse, not better....
cohenr@washpost.com