Human Smoke, Part One

Review: Human Smoke
By Nicholson Baker
The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

“Mohandas K. Gandhi was arrested for sedition. He had written an article that began: “How can there be any compromise whilst the British Lion continues to shake his gory claws in our faces?” It was March 10, 1922.

That Sunday, John Haynes Holmes, a pacifist preacher, gave a sermon in the Lyric Theater in New York. “Gandhi is disciplining three hundred million Indians to struggle for liberty, “ Holmes said, “to throw off the British yoke by nonviolence, and he is doing this with a degree of success which is shaking the empire to its foundations. He would save India in time, and there with perhaps save the world.”

Gandhi gave a statement at his trial. “I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent non-cooperation only multiplies evil and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence,” he said. He would, he told the court, cheerfully submit to the highest penalty for his crime.

He was sentenced to a term of six years in jail.

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The French arms company Schneider had recently sold four hundred tanks to Hitler’s Germany, Engelbrecht observed; the company disguised the sale by shipping the tanks via the Netherlands. The Germans had also ordered sixty airplanes from Vickers, the British maker of bombers. “In every war,” said Engelbrecht, “the armament maker who sells internationally is arming a potential enemy of his own country – and that, practically, if not legally, is treason. It was April 14, 1934.

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In a London courtroom, Sir Harry McGowan, the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries – Winston Churchill’s friend and investment adviser – sat before a royal commission that was investigating the armaments trade. It was February 6, 1936.

McGowan was asked about the sales of arms to opposing nations – to China and Japan, for instance. “I have no objection to selling arms to both sides,” McGowan answered. “I am not a purist in these things.” Imperial Chemical Industries wasn’t, McGowan said, producing any war gasses at the moment – but they could begin at any time, at the Government’s request.

The company broke ground on a new mustard-gas factory in Lancashire later that year.

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Oswald Garrison Villard, an editor of The Nation, wrote that great armaments were the road to fascism. “They bring with them increased worship of the State, increased nationalism, increased State service, and therefore play into the hands of those like Hitler and Mussolini who declare that the citizen is made for the state and not the State for the citizen,” he said. It was July 2, 1938.

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Bishop Bell asked for more liberal immigration policies in England and in the colonies. Refugees should be thought of as assets, not as liabilities, he insisted. It was July 27, 1938.

It was, Bell wrote a few weeks later, “hard to understand the seeming apathy with which the fate of the Jews and the non-Aryan Christians is being regarded by the people of the British Empire.” The refugees really couldn’t be called refugees, he said, “for they have as yet no countries of refuge.”

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On July 30, 1938, the German consul of Cleveland gave Henry Ford a birthday present from Hitler. It was a big gold-and-white medal with four gold eagles and four little swastikas on it, and it came with a wide red silk neck sash that stood out dramatically against Henry Ford’s white suit.

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Lockheed stopped selling airplanes to Japan, at the request of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Lockheed employees remained in Japan, however, assembling and testing the airplances that were arriving in fulfillment of previous orders. It was May 1939.

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Milton Mayer, assistant to the president of the University of Chicago, published an article in the Saturday Evening Post. It was October 7, 1939. The article was called “I Think I’ll Sit This One Out.”

All of Mayer’s onetime peace-pledging friends had now become eager interventionists, he said; Mayer, on the other hand, had not. “I make my decision to oppose this war, to oppose it now and when America enters it,” he said, “and I make that decision despite my horror of ‘the Berchtesgaden maniac’ and my disinclination to set myself up as a martyr to my ideals.”

Who was this Hitler, anyway? Mayer asked.

“A man, like the rest of us, capable, like the rest of us, of acting like a man; but a man brutalized, as the rest of us may be, by war and the poverty of war and the animal degradation of war – a man, in short, behaving like an animal.”

It wasn’t Hitler we had to fight, but fascism, and we couldn’t fight fascism by acting like animals – we could fight it only by trying to stay human. “War is at once the essence and apotheosis, the beginning and the triumph, of Fascism,” Mayer wrote. “I take myself to be an ordinary man, and I wonder what will happen to my humanity when I am hired, as Swift puts it, to kill in cold blood as many of my own species, who have never offended me, as I possibly can.”

Mayer remembered what President Wilson had said: We have no quarrel with the German people, “But it was the German people whom we shot,” Mayer said, “and the forces with whom we really had a quarrel grew and festered, and festered and grew, until they flowered into Hitlerism. And now we’re asked to shoot the German people again.”

Mayer said: “I can’t get it out of my head that if Hitler menaces America today, it is not because he won the last war, but because he lost it.”