[lbo-talk] Human Smoke

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Feb 27 07:37:38 PST 2009


I don't know Baker, or his book, but the argument pacifist members of my family made was that WWII's European theater was the product of the insanity of the Treaty of Versailles... a treaty designed, by folks with militarist sensibilities, to punish the Germans and ignore Italy.

I don't know enough about the role European and North American diplomacy - or lack there of - had w/r/t the roots of the war in the Pacific (beyond our perpetual dream of [drum roll please] the China market.)

-A

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Chris Maisano <cgmaisano at yahoo.com> wrote:


> I read Baker's book, and while it was certainly a gripping read, I think
> that his historical method and argument are way off. Undoubtedly figures
> like Churchill and Roosevelt had some rather unseemly personal opinions on a
> number of issues (i.e. on Jews), and certain aspects of the Allies' war
> against the Axis were morally/ethically indefensible (i.e. Dresden,
> Hiroshima, etc.). But what was the alternative to war against the Axis?
> Baker and other pacifists have never satisfactorily answered this question
> because there probably wasn't one. The war against them was evil in a number
> of ways, but probably even greater evil would have been perpetrated if the
> Nazis and their allies had not been defeated. If anything, Gandhi comes off
> just as bad in the book as Churchill and Roosevelt, and Baker's not so
> implicit argument that the Nazis could have been opposed and defeated
> through pacifist moral suasion seems completely bonkers to me.
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list