Pollitt and some, perhaps many, of her readers miss the essential point of Baker's book. He is not trying to rewrite history, but simply to use some (whatever their quality) historical resources to try to imagine a less Manichean world, a Second World War, a 20th Century.

Until many more efforts like Baker's are made, and by often-thoughtful people like Pollitt, I'm afraid we won't be able to escape recreating our violent world.

I applaud his thinking out-of-the-usual-boxes.

Mike Ferro

Oakland, CA

Katha Pollitt, in reminding us of the unspeakable brutalities of our Nazi enemies, omits all mention of the genocidal policies of the American, French, British, Belgian, and Russian (aka Soviet) empires, all of which exterminated and enslaved peoples on five continents for centuries, and all of which continued such mass murder during and after the Second "war for democracy."

This abysmal record is fully known to all who care to know it, so there is no use even summarizing it here. But I want to share one interesting anecdote which I chanced across recently, that aptly summarizes the casual brutality with which these empires tortured to death hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.

Leonard Woolf was a staunch anti-imperialist who vehemently opposed British policies of oppression. And yet he remained as unaware of the consequences of his own actions in Ceylon as did the city fathers of Dachau, who claimed ignorance of of the mass killings in their own backyard. In *Growing*, volume two of his autobiography, Woolf says

"There was a great deal to be said against our rule of Ceylon, which, of course, was bleak 'imperialism' or what is now fashionably called colonialism. One of the good things about it, however, was the extraordinary absence of the use of force in everyday life and government. Ceylon in 1906 was the exact opposite of a 'police state'. There were very few police and outside Colombo and Kandy not a single soldier." (p 92)

On the very previous page, however, Woolf quoted a contemporary letter of his: "The Arabs will do anything if you hit them hard enough with a walking stick, an occupation in which I have been engaged for the most part of the last 3 days and nights." Beating people, of course, is a far cry from massacring them; but Woolf never so much as considered the effects of the policies his violence was enforcing--in this case, confiscating two-thirds of the oyster harvest in the guise of taxes. Indeed, he whined about the psychological devastation which hanging people had upon him, consoling himself with the thought that "the best chance of getting uncivilized laws abolished or changed is that they should be strictly applied by civilized judges who abhor them."

Woolf vehemently opposed the imperial policy of banning chenas, or clearings made by slash-and-burn agriculture. In 1909 he confided to his official diary that "either the village must cease to exist or chenas must be granted." In 1911, when Woolf noticed widespread depopulation in the countryside, he complacently noted that "I could not want better proof of what I said last year, that the only way in which chenas can really be stopped is by a method which eventually means extermination of the persons who now live by chena cultivation." Over a million Ceylonese died in this one (to Woolf, insignificant, except for proving his own cleverness) episode.

And this from an anti-imperialist! Churchill's decades-long terror bombing of civilian victims of the Empire, and his deliberate starvation, during the war against Hitler itself, of between one and three million people in Bengal (this in addition to the usual victims of British policy) are well known.

Much more could be and has been documented at great length. But Pollitt and other apologists for the "Good War" ignore or downplay the unspeakable depredations of the Allies, which were systematic and have continued to this day. If we consider only the evilness of our opponents, and not the actual reasons for and results of our own policies, then the wars against Hitler, Milosevic, Hussein, and indeed innumerable other enemies (and friends) might seem fully justified. But these wars were not undertaken for any good or noble reasons, nor have they had, on balance, any but ignoble and horrific effects, including the (intended) spreading of new and equally vicious empires of oppression upon the ruins of the old. American policies have starved tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people throughout the world; and otherwise decent people notice, or care, about these tortured dead no more than Woolf did about the victims of the Empire he so loyally served.

Clifton Hawkins

Berkeley, California

There is something curious about Pollitt's review She says she is furious at pacifists. But which ones?

Surely not the pacifists from the thirties and forties. Pollitt herself argues that, as contemporaries, they did not have the knowledge and perspective on their time that we now have accumulated. They acted in principle and on conscience, given the facts they had.

Is she furious at the pacifist Baker? If so, why write in the plural? Who else has been making the argument that the World War II pacifists were right?

Is she extrapolating to pacifism in general-- past, present and future?

Methinks Ms. Pollitt needs to spend more time polishing her columns.

Daniel Fleisher

Baltimore, Maryland

Thank you, Katha Pollitt, for alerting me to Nicholson Baker's new book. After this review, I suspect reading Human Smoke will redouble my agreement with what Noam Chomsky has often remarked: it's easy to advocate peace.

I would add: it is oh-so-easy to advocate peace, especially when the advocatees aren't the ones likely to have to lay down and take the blows.

It doesn't surprise me to see the Buchananist right (which Gandhi would be happy to get in bed with if he were alive today) will probably love this book. Good job, Katha.

Douglas Presler

Minneapolis, MN

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Katha Pollitt, for seeing what has escaped too many reviewers who apparently slept through their high school history classes.

If Nicholson Baker were merely an idiot, he might be excused for this collection of cherry-picked cites he oh so carefully extracts from their context. As you say, he mentions Hitler's plan to move the Jews to Madagascar -- but if Baker was learned enough to know about the plan, then he was also savvy enough to know that Madagascar wasn't going to be a reservation, but a death camp run by the SS. Yet he deceitfully leaves that very important fact out of his parade of context-free factoids. (By the way: In Baker's previous novel Checkpoint, Mister Nonviolence Advocate has his hero seek to kill George W. Bush. So much for moral consistency.)

In the meantime, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that isolationist anti-Semites have already taken this book to their bosom: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/020283.html

Tamara Baker

St. Paul, Minnesota