----- Original Message ---- From: Max Sawicky <sawicky at verizon.net>
There's stuff like this on every page. Every paragraph, really. For those who don't know, the whole book is a series of these disconnected bits, but as you go along they weave themselves together. All meticulously documented in citations and footnotes. Amazing book. I've got to get me some more Nicholson Baker.
[WS:} I ordered the book (used, as usual) on Amazon.com, and while doing it I read some of the reviews, which were pretty thoughtful, imho, if not always favorable.
The main criticism was that pacifism that Baker advocates would not work with Hitler. It is posture easy to take by Westerners who were for the most part spared Hitler's atrocities, but those who experienced it first-hand (mainly Eastern Europeans) have a very different perspective.
I have not yet read the book, so obviously I cannot comment on its merits or demerits, but based on what I read in the reviews it appears that interpreting Baker's view as simplistic Gandhian pacifism of self-sacrifice and "turning the other cheek" is not the only one that is possible. If I were to argue the case of pacifism in the WW2 era, I would point out that it was the whole series of events, tit-for-tats, hyper-nationalism and bigotry, rabid anti-communism, and machiavellian geo-politics (i.e. "we" will take a piece of land for the sole reason of preventing "them" from taking it, which "we" are sure "they" are planning) that led to the war. It is not that important who fired the first shot in the game - it happened to be Hitler, but if it were not him it would be another villain playing this game.
In that context, teh argument for pacifism is not for refusing to fire the second shot (and "trun the other cheek"), but to stop playing that game before it escalates to a point when firing shots is anything but inevitable. If that is what Baker implies in his book - I am all for it, but it it is simply "turn-the-other-cheek-ism" - I am not buying.
While we are at that, I think that labor and most affiliated parties bear their fair share of responsibility for the two World Wars, because they jumped on the bandwagon of nationalism (e.g. German social democrats) and few were willing to sabotage the war efforts of their national governments (Rosa Luxemburg was a commendable excpetion.)
Wojtek