Letters to the Editor
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‘The War for History’
In “The War for History,” you say that my book “Human Smoke” suggests that Roosevelt and Churchill “were as bad as Hitler” [Editorial, March 20, 2008].
The book doesn’t do that, nor do I believe it. Hitler was the true Ur-source and instigator of the horrors that beset the middle of the 20th century.
I don’t suggest any equivalence of wrongs in the book because a) it’s false, and because b) applying little equal signs is an exceedingly crude way of looking at these complicated men.
The notion of moral equivalence is in fact alien to the book’s method, which proceeds as a series of incremental moments of decision, as it is to legal notions of justice and personal responsibility. Your editorial rightly asks for a close look at historical sources, and it cautions against the too-easy substitution of one myth for another. Sometimes, though, the extant record presents uncomfortable facts which a writer must consider.
In 1940, Britain elected to pursue a long, slow war of attrition, founded on a hunger blockade of Europe and the nightly bombing of civilian centers.
Did this decision help the people who, under the Nazi regime, most needed help — the Jews in Poland and Germany? Does exploding things on people’s heads ever get us closer to where we should be going?
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.
NICHOLSON BAKER
South Berwick, Maine
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