[Peace-discuss] From Carl Estabrook

[Karen Aram]

An article from Carl Estabrook, recently posted on FB.


The Dangerous Myth of the Good War

--Nicholson Baker, “Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” | Harper's Magazine, May 2011

Throughout Hitler’s tenure the question for the rest of the world was how to respond to a man who was (a) violent; (b) highly irrational; (c) vehemently racist; (d) professedly suicidal; and (e) in charge of an expanding empire. One possibility was to build weapons and raise armies, make demands, and threaten sanctions, embargoes, and other punishments. If Hitler failed to comply, we could say, “This has gone too far,” and declare war.

Pacifists thought this was precisely the wrong response. “The Government took the one course which I foresaw at the time would strengthen Hitler: they declared war on Germany,” Arthur Ponsonby said in the House of Lords in 1940. The novelist Vera Brittain, who published a biweekly Letter to Peace Lovers in London, agreed. “Nazism thrives, as we see repeatedly, on every policy which provokes resistance, such as bombing, blockade, and threats of ‘retribution,’” she wrote in her masterful 1942 polemic, Humiliation with Honour.

The Jews needed immigration visas, not Flying Fortresses. And who was doing their best to get them visas, as well as food, money, and hiding places? Pacifists were. Bertha Bracey helped arrange the Kindertransport, for example, which saved the lives of some 10,000 Jewish children; Runham Brown and Grace Beaton of the War Resisters International organized the release of Jews and other political prisoners from Dachau and Buchenwald; and André Trocmé and Burns Chalmers hid Jewish children among families in the South of France.

“We’ve got to fight Hitlerism” sounds good, because Hitler was so self-evidently horrible. But what fighting Hitlerism meant in practice was, largely, the five-year-long Churchillian experiment of undermining German “morale” by dropping magnesium firebombs and 2,000-pound blockbusters on various city centers. The firebombing killed and displaced a great many innocent people—including Jews in hiding—and obliterated entire neighborhoods. It was supposed to cause an anti-Nazi revolution, but it didn’t. “The victims are stunned, exhausted, apathetic, absorbed in the immediate tasks of finding food and shelter,” wrote Brittain in 1944. “But when they recover, who can doubt that there will be, among the majority at any rate, the desire for revenge and a hardening process—even if, for a time, it may be subdued by fear?” If you drop things on people’s heads, they get angry and unite behind their leader. This was, after all, just what had happened during the Blitz in London.

The Holocaust was, among many other things, the biggest hostage crisis of all time. Hostage-taking was Hitler’s preferred method from the beginning. In 1923, he led a group of ultranationalists into a beer hall in Munich and, waving a gun, held government officials prisoner. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, he imprisoned thousands of Jews, releasing them only after the Jewish community paid a huge ransom. In occupied France, Holland, Norway, and Yugoslavia, Jews were held hostage and often executed in reprisal for local partisan activity.

The American middle class, still dimly recalling the trenches, the mud, the rats, the typhus, and the general obscene futility of World War I, was perhaps slightly closer to pacifism than to Roosevelt’s interventionism—until December 7, 1941. Once Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row burned and sank, the country cried for the incineration of Tokyo.

The shift came in late 1941, occasioned by the event that transformed a pan-European war into a world war: “the entry of the United States into the conflict.” A contemporary wrote: “Although the ‘Final Solution,’ the decision to kill all the Jews under German control, was planned well in advance, its full implementation may have been delayed until the U.S. entered the war. Now the Jews under German control had lost their potential value as hostages.”

In any case, on December 12, 1941, Hitler confirmed his intentions in a talk before Goebbels and other party leaders. In his diary, Goebbels later summarized the Führer’s remarks: “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

Chelmno, the first killing factory, had already commenced operation on December 8, 1941: Jews from the ghetto in the Polish town of Kolo were suffocated with exhaust gasses in sealed trucks. Beginning in March 1942, the Lublin ghetto was liquidated: Jews by the thousands were taken to a second extermination camp, Belzec, and gassed there. More Jews, including orphaned children and old people who had until then been excluded from the camps, were taken from Vienna at the beginning of June. Leonhard Friedrich, a German Quaker arrested in May for helping Jews, later wrote: “In the six months after the United States entered the war, the Gestapo felt under no restraints.”

During this same midwar period, the Royal Air Force’s attacks on German civilian life crossed a new threshold of intensity. The militarily insignificant city of Lübeck, on the Baltic Sea, crowded with wood-timbered architectural treasures, was the target of the first truly successful mass firebombing, on the night of March 28, 1942, which burned much of the old city and destroyed a famous, centuries-old painting cycle, Totentanz (“The Dance of Death”). “Blast and bomb, attack and attack until there is nothing left,” said the Sunday Express. “Even if ‘Lübecking’ does not crack the morale of Germany, it is certainly going to raise our spirits,” said the Daily Mail (Vera Brittain, reading through a pile of these clippings, exclaimed: “We are Gadarene swine, inhabited by devils of our own making, rushing down a steep place into the sea.”)

Operation Millennium was the RAF’s next large-scale fire raid, at the end of May. Nearly 1,000 bombers flowed toward the city of Cologne, where they dropped about 1,600 tons of bombs—more firebombs than high explosives—in half an hour, destroying tens of thousands of houses and apartments and more than twenty churches. The area around the city’s main cathedral was a roasted ruin. “You have no idea of the thrill and encouragement which the Royal Air Force bombing has given to all of us here,” wrote Roosevelt’s personal aide, Harry Hopkins, to Churchill. He added: “I imagine the Germans know all too well what they have to look forward to.”

No doubt the Germans did know—in any case, they promptly blamed the Jews for the bombings. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels said that Germans were now fighting for their very skins. Then again came the overt threat: “In this war the Jews are playing their most criminal game and they will have to pay for it with the extermination of their race throughout Europe and, maybe, even beyond.”

Confirmation of the Final Solution didn’t get out widely in the Western press until November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise, after inexplicable delays, called a press conference to reveal the substance of an urgent telegram he had received from Switzerland in August. The Associated Press reported: “Dr. Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said tonight that he had learned through sources confirmed by the State Department that about half the estimated 4,000,000 Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe have been slain in an ‘extermination campaign.’”

The atrocity was so gargantuan, wrote The Nation, that it would have to await the perspective of history to be understood. Again came the question—what to do? “Peace with Hitler for the sake of saving hostages is out of the question,” the editors asserted. “Such a surrender would mean disaster for the world, for the Jews above all. Yet the harder we fight, the nearer the doom of the Nazis approaches, the fiercer will grow their homicidal mania. Let it be admitted in all solemnity that there is no escape from this ghastly dilemma.” The only thing to do was fight on.

No, there was a better way, thought Jessie Wallace Hughan, founder of the War Resisters League. Hughan, a soft-faced, wide-smiling woman in her late sixties, was a poet and high school teacher (she had been Abraham Kaufman’s English teacher at Textile High School). She sent a letter to two fellow pacifist leaders, asking them to help her mount a campaign.

“It seems that the only way to save thousands and perhaps millions of European Jews from destruction would be for our government to broadcast the promise of a speedy and favorable armistice on condition that the European minorities are not molested any further. I know how improbable it is that our U.S. government would accept this but if it is the only possibility, ought not our pacifist groups to take some action?”

Hughan gave talks on the necessity of rescue, she wrote letters to the State Department and the White House, and she and Abraham Kaufman, with the help of volunteers, distributed thousands of pro-armistice flyers. A peace without delay, conditional upon the release of Jews and other political prisoners, might bring the end of Hitler’s reign, she suggested: “There are many anti-Nazis in the Reich, and hope is a stronger revolutionary force than despair.” She wrote a blunt letter on the subject to the New York Times: “We must act now, because dead men cannot be liberated.” The Times didn’t print it.

Other pacifists publicly took up this cause. “Peace Now Without Victory Will Save Jews,” wrote Dorothy Day on the front page of her Catholic Worker, and the Jewish Peace Fellowship called for an armistice to prevent Jewish extermination and “make an end to the world-wide slaughter.” Brittain said that Jewish rescue required “the termination or the interruption of the war, and not its increasingly bitter continuation.”

Even lapsed or near pacifists—including Eleanor Rathbone in the House of Commons, and the publisher Victor Gollancz—urgently echoed this sentiment: If we failed to make some kind of direct offer to Hitler for the safe passage of Jews, we shared a responsibility for their fate. Gollancz sold a quarter of a million copies of an extraordinary pamphlet called “Let My People Go,” in which he questioned the Churchill government’s promise of postwar retribution. “This ‘policy,’ it must be plainly said, will not save a single Jewish life,” he wrote.

“Will the death, after the war, of a Latvian or Lithuanian criminal, or of a Nazi youth who for ten years has been specially and deliberately trained to lose his humanity—will the death of these reduce by one jot or tittle the agony of a Jewish child who perhaps at this very moment at which I write, on Christmas day, three hours after the sweet childish carol, “O come, all ye faithful,” was broadcast before the seven o’clock news, is going to her death in a sealed coach, her lungs poisoned with the unslaked lime with which the floor is strewn, and with the dead standing upright about her, because there is no room for them to fall?”

What mattered, Gollancz held, was, and he put it in italics, the saving of life now. The German government had to be approached immediately and asked to allow Jews to emigrate. The Allies had nothing to lose with such a proposal. “If refused, that would strip Hitler of the excuse that he cannot afford to fill useless mouths,” Gollancz wrote. “If accepted, it would not frustrate the economic blockade, because Hitler’s alternative is not feeding but extermination.”

Nobody in authority in Britain and the United States paid heed to these promptings. Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, who’d been tasked by Churchill with handling queries about refugees, dealt coldly with one of many importunate delegations, saying that any diplomatic effort to obtain the release of the Jews from Hitler was “fantastically impossible.” On a trip to the United States, Eden candidly told Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, that the real difficulty with asking Hitler for the Jews was that “Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.” Churchill agreed. “Even were we to obtain permission to withdraw all Jews,” he wrote in reply to one pleading letter, “transport alone presents a problem which will be difficult of solution.”

Not enough shipping and transport? Two years earlier, the British had evacuated nearly 340,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk in just nine days. The U.S. Air Force had many thousands of new planes. During even a brief armistice, the Allies could have airlifted and transported refugees in very large numbers out of the German sphere.

In March 1944, with thousands of Jews still living who were not destined to survive, the War Resisters League published an updated demand that the Allies call a peace conference, stipulating Jewish deliverance. “The fortunes of war have turned, and with them the responsibility for war,” Hughan wrote. “The guilt is upon our heads until we offer our enemies an honorable alternative to bitter-end slaughter. Are we fighting for mere victory or, as enlightened adults, for humanity and civilization?”

We were fighting, it seems, for mere victory. It was inconceivable that we could stop, even though an end to the fighting was the solvent that would have dissolved quicker than anything the thick glue of fear that held Hitler and Germany together. By 1944, Hitler’s health was failing. He was evil, but he wasn’t immortal. Whether or not the German opposition, in the sudden stillness of a conditional armistice, would have been able to remove him from power, he would eventually be dead and gone. And some of his millions of victims—if such an armistice had been secured—would have lived.

Peace and quiet was what the world needed so desperately then. Time to think, and mourn. Time to sleep without fear. Time to crawl out of the wreckage of wherever you were and look around, and remember what being human was all about. Instead, what did we do? Bomb, burn, blast, and starve, waiting for the unconditional surrender that didn’t come until the Red Army was in Berlin. We came up with a new kind of “sticky flaming goo,” as the New York Times called what would later be known as napalm. Allied airplanes burned the Rouen cathedral, so that the stones crumbled to pieces when touched, destroyed Monte Cassino, and killed 200 schoolchildren during a single raid in Milan. A conservative MP, Reginald Purbrick, who had wanted the Royal Air Force to drop a big bomb into the crater of Mount Vesuvius (“to make a practical test as to whether the disturbances created thereby will give rise to severe earthquakes and eruptions”), began asking the prime minister whether the Royal Air Force might bomb Dresden and other cities in eastern Germany. Churchill eventually obliged him. Remorse works well, but it works only in peacetime.

When Vera Brittain argued against the Allied program of urban obliteration in her pamphlet Massacre by Bombing, the Writers’ War Board, a government-funded American propaganda agency, pulled out all the stops in attacking her. MacKinlay Kantor (who later cowrote Curtis LeMay’s memoir, the one that talked about bombing Vietnam “back into the Stone Age”) published a letter in the Times dismissing Brittain’s “anguished ramblings.” The Japanese and Germans well understood the “language of bombs,” Kantor said. “May we continue to speak it until all necessity for such cruel oratory has passed.”

Some historians, still believing that bombing has a magical power to communicate, conclude from this dismal stretch of history that the Allied air forces should have bombed the railroad tracks that led to the death camps, or bombed the camps themselves. But bombing would have done absolutely nothing except kill more Jews (and Jews were already dying when Allied fighter planes routinely strafed boxcars in transit.) A cease-fire—“a pause in the fury of hostilities,” as Vera Brittain called it in one of her newsletters—was the one chance the Allies had to save Jewish lives, and the pacifists proposed it repeatedly, using every means available to them.

So the Holocaust continued, and the firebombing continued: two parallel, incommensurable, war-born leviathans of pointless malice that fed each other and could each have been stopped long before they were. The mills of God ground the cities of Europe to powder—very slowly—and then the top Nazis chewed their cyanide pills or were executed at Nuremberg. Sixty million people died all over the world so that Hitler, Himmler, and Goering could commit suicide? How utterly ridiculous and tragic.

Pacifism at its best, said Arthur Ponsonby, is “intensely practical.” Its primary object is the saving of life. To that overriding end, pacifists opposed the counterproductive barbarity of the Allied bombing campaign, and they offered positive proposals to save the Jews: create safe havens, call an armistice, negotiate a peace that would guarantee the passage of refugees. We should have tried. If the armistice plan failed, then it failed. We could always have resumed the battle. Not trying leaves us culpable.

At a Jewish Peace Fellowship meeting in Cincinnati some years after the war, Rabbi Cronbach was asked how any pacifist could justify opposition to World War II. “War was the sustenance of Hitler,” Cronbach answered. “When the Allies began killing Germans, Hitler threatened that, for every German slain, ten Jews would be slain, and that threat was carried out. We in America are not without some responsibility for that Jewish catastrophe.”

If we don’t take seriously pacifists like Cronbach, Hughan, Kaufman, Day, and Brittain—these people who thought as earnestly about wars and their consequences as did politicians or generals or think-tankers—we’ll be forever suspended in a kind of immobilizing sticky goo of euphemism and self-deception. We’ll talk about intervention and preemption and no-fly zones, and we’ll steer drones around distant countries on murder sorties. We’ll arm the world with weaponry, and every so often we’ll feel justified in taxiing out a few of our stealth airplanes from their air-conditioned hangars and dropping some expensive bombs. Iran? Pakistan? North Korea?

--Nicholson Baker, “Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War,” | Harper's Magazine, May 2011
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