ESSAY WHY I’M A PACIFIST The dangerous myth of the Good War By Nicholson Baker ix months after end of the First theS Japanese attack World War: a peace on Pearl Harbor, without victory. “We Abraham Kaufman, ask for peace now,” the executive secre- Kaufman said, tary of the War Re- “while there is still a sisters League, stood world to discuss up in the auditori- aims, not when it is um of the Union too late.” Methodist Church What explained in Manhattan and Kaufman’s urgency? said something that It was simple: he was dif! cult to say. didn’t want any Kaufman, a man of more people to suffer thirty-three who and die. Civilian had put himself massacres and mili- through City Col- tary horrors were lege at night and reported daily, and had worked Sun- Kaufman feared that days selling maga- the war would prove zines and candy in a to be, as he’d written subway station, in- to the New York sisted that we need- Times two years ear- ed peace now—and lier, “so disastrous as that to get peace to make the 1917 now, we needed to adventure seem negotiate with Hit- quite mild.” He un- ler. “This tremen- derstood exactly dous war can be what was at stake. In ended by just one his view, a negotiat- small spark of truth and sanity,” he said. negotiating with Hitler, and with Japan ed peace with Hitler was, paradoxi- To those who argued that you too—over prisoners of war, for exam- cally, the best chance the Allies had of couldn’t negotiate with Hitler, Kaufman ple, and the sending of food to Greece. protecting the world from Hitler’s last- replied that the Allies were already It was important to confer right away, ditch, exterminative frenzy. Nicholson Baker’s most recent book is The Kaufman believed, before either side Kaufman was one of a surpris- Anthologist, a novel. He lives in Maine had lost. Our aim should be what ingly vocal group of World War II with his family. Woodrow Wilson had hoped for at the pacifists —absolute pacifists, who All artwork from the National Circulating Library of Students’ Peace Posters Collected Records. Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania ESSAY 41 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50_Baker Final.indd 41 3/29/11 11:11 AAMM were opposed to any war service. their principled opposition to that over my book obsessively, for hours at a They weren’t, all of them, against enormous war—the war that Hitler time—and she hated it. “By the time I personal or familial self-defense, or began—but I do think you will want ! nished,” she wrote, “I felt something I against law enforcement. But they to take their position seriously, and see had never felt before: fury at paci! sts.” did hold that war was, in the words for yourself whether there Pollitt’s displeasure hurt, as negative of the British paci! st and parliamen- was some wisdom in it. reviews from thoughtful readers gener- tarian Arthur Ponsonby, “a monster ally do. But I still think the paci! sts of born of hypocrisy, fed on falsehood, raising pacifists—using the World War II were right. In fact, the fattened on humbug, kept alive by P-wordP in any positive way, but es- more I learn about the war, the more I superstition, directed to the death pecially in connection with the understand that the paci! sts were the and torture of millions, succeeding Second World War—embarrasses only ones, during a time of catastroph- in no high purpose, degrading to some people, and it makes some ic violence, who repeatedly put forward humanity, endangering civilization people angry. I found this out in proposals that had any chance of and bringing forth in its travail a 2008, when I published a book saving a threatened people. They weren’t hideous brood of strife, con" ict and about the beginnings of the war. naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they war, more war.” Along with Kaufman Human Smoke was a mosaic of con- were psychologically and Ponsonby—and thousands of tradictory fragments and moments acute realists. conscientious objectors who spent in time, composed largely of quota- time in jail, in rural work camps, in tions: it made no direct arguments ho was in trouble in Europe? hospitals, or in controlled starvation on behalf of any single interpreta- JewsW were, of course. Hitler had, from studies—the ranks of wartime paci- tion of World War II. But in an af- the very beginning of his political ca- ! sts included Vera Brittain, Rabbi terword, I dedicated the book to reer, fantasized publicly about killing Abraham Cronbach, Dorothy Day, the memory of Clarence Pickett—a Jews. They must go, he said, they and Jessie Wallace Hughan. Quaker relief worker —and other must be wiped out—he said so in the I admire these people. They be- British and American paci! sts, be- 1920s, he said so in the 1930s, he said lieved in acts of mercy rather than in cause I was moved by what they’d so throughout the war (when they ! st-shaking vows of retribution. They tried to do. “They tried to save were in fact being wiped out), and in kept their minds on who was actually Jewish refugees,” I wrote, “feed Eu- his bunker in 1945, with a cyanide in trouble. They suffered, some in rope, reconcile the United States pill and a pistol in front of him, his small ways, some in large, for what and Japan, and stop the war from hands shaking from Parkinson’s, he they did and said. They were, I think, happening. They failed, but they closed his last will and testament beautiful examples of what it means to were right.” with a ! nal paranoid expostulation, be human. I don’t expect you to agree, They were what? In a review in The condemning “the universal poisoner necessarily, that they were right in Nation, Katha Pollitt said she pored of all peoples, international Jewry.” 42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2011 41-50_Baker Final5.indd 42 3/25/11 1:36 PPMM Throughout Hitler’s tenure, then, tasks of finding food and shelter,” winning of World War II was unques- the question for the rest of the world wrote Brittain in 1944. “But when tionably a plume in our cap, was it not? was how to respond to a man who was they recover, who can doubt that there We’d stepped into the fray; we’d turned (a) violent; (b) highly irrational; (c) will be, among the majority at any the tide of battle. At that point I put vehemently racist; (d) professedly sui- rate, the desire for revenge and a hard- aside political thought altogether. It cidal; and (e) in charge of an expand- ening process—even if, for a time, it was beyond me. Its prose was bad. I ing empire. One possibility was to may be subdued by fear?” If you drop concentrated on writing about what build weapons and raise armies, make things on people’s heads, they get an- struck me as funny and true. demands, and threaten sanctions, gry and unite behind their leader. This Then came the Gulf War. I’d just embargoes, and other punishments. was, after all, just what had hap- ! nished writing an upbeat novel about If Hitler failed to comply, we could pened during the Blitz phone sex. My wife and I watched Op- say, “This has gone too far,” and de- in London. eration Desert Storm on TV, while it clare war. was actually happening. Peter Arnett Paci! sts thought this was precisely ven so,” you may say, “I don’t and Bernard Shaw were up on the roof the wrong response. “The Govern- “like E the word ‘pacifist.’ If somebody of the Hotel Al-Rasheed in Baghdad. ment took the one course which I came after me or someone I loved, I’d We saw the tracer ! re sprout up over foresaw at the time would strengthen grab a baseball bat, or a gun, and I’d that enormous complicated green city Hitler: they declared war on Germany,” ! ght him off.” Of course you would. I with its ancient name, and we saw the Arthur Ponsonby said in the House of would, too. In fact, that’s exactly what slow toppling of the communication Lords in 1940. The novelist Vera Brit- I said in college to my girlfriend— tower, which looked like Seattle’s Space tain, who published a biweekly Letter who’s now my wife—when she an- Needle, and then, within hours (or so to Peace Lovers in London, agreed. nounced that she was a paci! st. I also I remember it), we were shown grainy “Nazism thrives, as we see repeatedly, said, What about Hitler? black-and-white clips of precision- on every policy which provokes resis- She made two observations: that guided bombs as they descended to- tance, such as bombing, blockade, and her father had served in World War II ward things that looked like blank, threats of ‘retribution,’ ” she wrote in and had come back a paci! st, and that cast-concrete bunkers. Soundless ex- her masterful 1942 polemic, Humilia- sending off a lot of eighteen-year-old plosions followed. Wolf Blitzer seemed tion with Honour. boys to kill and wound other eighteen- unfazed by it all. The Jews needed immigration vi- year-old boys wasn’t the way to oppose I thought: People are probably dying sas, not Flying Fortresses.