Throughout Hitler’s tenure, then, 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 1942 masterpiece, 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. Quaker pacifist Bertha Bracey helped arrange the Kindertransport, which saved the lives of some ten thousand Jewish children; pacifists Runham Brown and Grace Beaton of War Resisters International organized the release of Jews and other political prisoners from Dachau and Buchenwald; pacifists André Trocmé and Burns Chalmers hid Jewish children among families in Southern France; and pacifist Eva Hermann spent two years in prison for her actions as a judenhelfer (“Jew helper”). “I am fully conscious of the fact that my late husband and I did nothing special,” Hermann said when she later received an award from Yad Vashem. “We simply tried to remain human in the midst of inhumanity.”
“We’ve got to fight Hitlerism” sounds good, because Hitler was so self-evidently horrible. But what fighting Hitlerism meant in practice was, above all, the five-year-long Churchillian experiment of undermining German “morale” by dropping magnesium firebombs and two-thousand-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 ‘experiment’ has demonstrated, so far, that mass bombing does not induce revolt or break morale,” Vera Brittain wrote in 1944:
The victims are stunned, exhausted, apathetic, absorbed in the immediate tasks of finding food and shelter. 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 they unite behind their leader. This was, after all, just what had happened during the Blitz in London.
“Even so,” you may say, “I don’t like the word pacifist. If somebody came after me or someone I loved, I’d grab a baseball bat, or a gun, and I’d fight him off.” Of course you would. I would, too. In fact, that’s exactly what I said in college to my girlfriend — who’s now my wife — when she announced that she was a pacifist. I also said, What about Hitler? She made two observations: that her father had served in World War II and had come back a pacifist, and that sending off a lot of eighteen-year-old boys to kill and wound other eighteen-year-old boys wasn’t the way to oppose Hitler. I said, Well, what other way was there? Nonviolent resistance, she replied. I wasn’t persuaded. Still, her willingness to defend her position made a permanent notch, an opening, in my ethical sense.
Next came my brief, insufferable Young Republican phase. For a year, just out of college, I worked on Wall Street, at a company called L. F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. (They’re gone now.) I became a confused but cocky neoconservative. I subscribed to Commentary, enthralled by its brilliant pugnacity. I read F. A. Hayek, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Karl Popper, Robert Nozick, and Edmund Burke.
I wasn’t interested in wars, because wars are sad and wasteful and miserable-making, and battleships and gold epaulettes are ridiculous. But I was excited by the notion of free markets, by the information-conveying subtlety of daily price adjustments, and I thought, Heck, if Commentary is right about F. A. Hayek, maybe they’re right about fighting communism, too. Surely we had to have hardened missile silos and Star Wars satellites and battalions of Abrams tanks. And the winning of World War II was unquestionably a plume in our cap, was it not? We’d stepped into the fray; we’d turned the tide of battle. At that point I put aside political thought altogether. It was beyond me. Its prose was bad. I concentrated on writing about what struck me as funny and true.
Then came the Gulf War. I’d just finished writing an upbeat novel about phone sex. My wife and I watched Operation Desert Storm on TV, while it was actually happening. Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw were up on the roof of the Hotel Al-Rasheed in Baghdad. We saw the tracer fire sprout up over that enormous complicated green city with its ancient name, and we saw the slow toppling of the communication tower, which looked like Seattle’s Space Needle, and then, within hours (or so I remember it), we were shown grainy black-and-white clips of precision-guided bombs as they descended toward things that looked like blank, cast-concrete bunkers. Soundless explosions followed. Wolf Blitzer seemed unfazed by it all.
I thought: people are probably dying down there. They can’t not be. There was something awful in being able to witness feats of violent urban destruction as they unfolded — to know that big things that had been unbroken were now broken, and that human beings were mutilated and moaning who had been whole — and to comprehend that I was, simply by virtue of being a compliant part of my country’s tax base, paying for all this unjustifiable, night-visioned havoc.
Afterward we learned that those early “surgical” strikes had gone astray, some of them, and had killed and wounded large numbers of civilians. We also learned that there were many thousands of bombing runs, or “sorties”—such a clean-sounding word — and that only about 10 percent of the flights had employed “smart” weaponry. Most of the bombing of Iraq in those years, it turned out, was just as blind and dumb as the carpet bombings of World War II. There was, however, a new type of incendiary weapon in use: depleted uranium shells, fired from Gatling guns and helicopter gunships, which became unstoppably heavy burning spears that vaporized metal on contact, leaving behind a wind-borne dust that some said caused birth defects and cancers. Then came the medical blockade, years of it, and punitive bombings. What President Bush began, President Clinton continued. I thought, No, I’m sorry, this makes no sense. I don’t care what Commentary says: this is not right.
Later still, I saw a documentary on PBS called America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference, about the State Department’s despicable blockage of visas for Jewish refugees, which permanently broke my trust in Franklin Roosevelt. Then Bill Clinton’s Air Force bombed Belgrade. They used the BLU-114/B “soft-bomb,” which flung a fettuccine of short-circuiting filaments over power stations in order to bring on massive blackouts, and they also dropped a lot of conventional explosives from high altitudes, killing hundreds of people. And then, in 2002, we bombed Afghanistan, using 15,000-pound “daisy cutters,” and killed more people; and then we bombed Iraq again and destroyed more power plants and killed more people — wedding parties, invalids sleeping in their beds. And as we debated the merits of each of these attacks, we inevitably referred back to our touchstone, our exemplar: the Second World War.