But by stopping in 1941, Baker avoids arguing about what did bring the war to an end. And what would have happened if the war had not been fought at all? Could it have been any worse? Would an even greater holocaust have taken place — albeit at a more leisurely pace? Or would nonviolence, widely and determinedly practised, have prevailed?
Baker does not pretend to know. Nor can we. But his book makes a strong case, and makes it originally and with astonishing attack and verve, that history having given the fight-fire-with-fire mob their chance, we should just for once try fighting fire with water.
‘Our way of passive resistance has never yet been tried out,’ said the Labour MP George Lansbury in 1939, ‘but war has been tried through all the centuries and has absolutely failed.’ Right on.
Comments
Eoin Lynch
April 24th, 2008 3:52pmIt's quite a pity that a historian wasn't used to review this book.Sam Leith is out of his depth.Any undergraduate worth his salt can rubbish the claims in this book as they have been used before by the likes of David Irving.
The Nazis did not come to power in 1933 with the intention of murdering all of Europe's Jews.Their plan was to make life so unbearable through pogroms and legal oppression for German Jews to flee.However their plans for living space brought millions of Jews into their sphere and their plans became more radical with deportation to Poland,Madagascar and Russia were all offered for the solution to the 'Jewish question'.Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was not going to be defeated so easily the Nazis embarked on the Holocaust.
Churchill was not a war monger but foresaw that appeasing the Nazis was useless as Chamberlain and the arch appeaser Stalin found to their cost.Only Churchill could have bullied and directed every department of state for the goal of victory.
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DG Forbes
April 24th, 2008 12:00pmChurchill may have revelled in the war but he didn’t start it. It was begun by predessors whose patience snapped and who broke with a long policy of appeasement, deciding on the evidence that pacifism didn’t work with someone like Hitler and likely never would. Chamberlain then sided with Churchill in the cabinet struggle of May 1940 with Halifax over whether we should fight or surrender on Hitler’s terms (compare the fate of France shortly after). Of course, that was a choice but people at the time chose freely not to make it and they assumed the corollary that total war needed to be met by total war. Didn’t the same Miss Partridge say elsewhere that it was essential the war should be won to save the intellectuals? The facts are what you chose to make of them in a contest at this distance that’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind. For example, it’s an article of faith with moral absolutists that area bombing was not only a war crime but was ineffective as a weapon against the German economy. That’s not what Speer or Jodl said, according to the literature. The further the war recedes, the easier it becomes to distort what happened through the lens of contemporary moral fashion. As Leith said, Baker knew where he was going to arrive when he sat down to write. That’s okay; Leith’s own prevarications have a distinctly nastier smell. Incidentally, what would have been the ‘right’ thing to do if we had signed a deal with Hitler and he then went on to attack the Soviet Union?
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