The Current Crisis
Nicholson Baker Coogler
We have a witless winner in the Worst Book of the Year competition.
WASHINGTON — ‘Tis the season when prestigious institutions give their annual awards, and with no further ceremony allow me to announce that the J. Gordon Coogler Committee has conferred its Worst Book of the Year Award for 2008 on Nicholson Baker for Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, $30). Actually, World War II saved civilization, but the brute stupidity of this book suggests what a book might be like at the end of civilization. Our present civilization has advanced, in part, because of its great minds’ attention to fact, to rational analysis, and to good sense. The brute mind that perpetrated this book opposes all three. Baker is himself “the end of civilization.” His earlier books are fictional works dealing with telephone sex and masturbation. This book is 576 pages of masturbation roused by the idea that Winston Churchill was as murderous as Hitler; though, unlike Hitler, Churchill was a heavy drinker, a smoker, and a wit.
Baker does not comprehend wit. Consequently, time and again he takes a Churchill joke as a serious statement. Thus in 1922 when Churchill on the floor of Parliament explains Britain’s cessation of its World War I aerial assaults on Berlin as “owing to our having run short of Germans and enemies….” Baker seems to think Churchill wanted to continue the killing and never to end the war. Elsewhere Baker’s humorless monomania against Churchill ensnares the author in contradictions. “You and others may desire to kill women and children,” Baker quotes Churchill as saying to a Conservative MP in an October 1940 debate, but “My motto is ‘Business before pleasure.’” The debate was over whether to bomb German population centers. Churchill was against it. His Tory opponent was for it. At the time, Hitler was bombing London.
I have been told by professors of the humanities that adherence to fact is considered old-fashioned among the profs these days. Facts are in the eye of the beholder. Thus writers such as this year’s Coogler Laureate can just make things up as they advance their argument. Most historians know that Churchill was in his day pro-Jewish, a Zionist, and eventually a supporter of Israel. Baker implies that Churchill was an anti-Semite who in a February 8, 1920 article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald accused Jews of being in a “sinister” “worldwide conspiracy.” Actually in that article Churchill was speaking of Russian Jews who were active in Bolshevism, which was indeed a sinister worldwide conspiracy. At another point in the article Churchill writes that “We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.” Elsewhere Baker quotes Churchill as writing the head of the RAF in 1920 that “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas” against opponents in what is today Iraq. Read in its entirety, the letter is clearly speaking of “lachrymatory gas” — or, as we say today, tear gas.
There are plenty of other facts that are juggled, cosmeticized, and simply invented in this preposterous book. But then what else would one expect from a book whose thesis is so implausible? Baker claims that through intelligence decrypts Churchill knew the British industrial city of Coventry was about to be bombed but let it happen rather than tip off the Nazis that his cryptographers had broken the Nazi code. Historians such as Sir Martin Gilbert disproved this bunk years ago, showing that despite the cryptographers’ brilliance they had failed to crack the Nazi codeword for Coventry. Baker also claims that “Churchill wanted to starve them [German Jews] until they revolted against their oppressors.” Of course Baker is referring to the British blockade of the continent, which he presents as a war crime rather than the reprise of a strategy that had enabled Britain to subdue Napoleon in the 19th century and the Kaiser in the 20th.
Yet my favorite misappropriated fact in this book comes in the author’s explanation of his macabre title, Human Smoke. Baker attributes the words to former German Chief of Staff, Franz Halder, who “when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz late in the war, [claimed] he saw flakes of human smoke blow into his cell.” Baker, you nincompoop, Halder was imprisoned in Dachau and Flossenburg — stick with telephone sex and masturbation, but enjoy your Coogler!
About the Author
R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His previous books include the New York Times bestseller Boy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn’t Work: Social Democracy’s Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; The Clinton Crack-Up; and After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (48) | Leave a comment
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Franklin Meunier| 1.15.09 @ 8:31AM
I came into work this morning slightly despondant, but the Coogly award has made my day. Thank you for setting the record straight on our English hero. I'll still be laughing by martini hour!
Trotter| 1.15.09 @ 8:51AM
Nicholson Baker is a self-proclaimed pacifist who has spent years trying to prove that England and the US pushed Germany into WWII. This fact alone should have had any honest, self-respecting publisher turn down this book.
Hal G. P. colebatch| 1.15.09 @ 8:58AM
Thank you, R.E.T.! A well-deserved award. It made my day, too!
jerryofva| 1.15.09 @ 9:26AM
Baker's book is like science fiction. It is not about the future or a fictional past. It is about today. Baker is an anti-Semite who has written an allegory on the Arab-Israeli conflict. You see Jews were the cause of the damage done to civilization in the mid 20th century. Had we let Hitler kill the Jews then all would have been fine now. What he means to say is now that the Jews are once again under attack we should not stand in the way of their deaths. Unlike the last generation of Nazis, Baker stands on the sidelines cheering on the Muslims. He and his ilk are cowards preening in faux self righteousness.
Last year both Baker and Buchanan have attacked Churchill as a warmonger and the root cause of Nazi Germany’s aggression. The first clue that these gentleman are full of it is that Churchill was a back bencher railing against the government and had no influence on policy until he was appointed to his old job of First Lord of the Admiralty on eve the start of the war.
Bill C.| 1.15.09 @ 11:37AM
Who the heck would want to read such drivel, Obama voters? Probably discounted for MOVEON.ORG morons.
elhombrelibre| 1.15.09 @ 11:47AM
RET,
I'd like to see the long list of winners over the many years you've been passing out this unique award. I believe Jimmuh Carter has the most Coogler Awards, but for the sake of knowing who all of the rogues are a complete list would be useful.
Ty Knoy| 1.15.09 @ 1:54PM
I hate to confess it, but based on a review in the NYT, I ordered this book and paid money for it. Even read about half-way through. It is just a collection of between-the-wars news clips that are strung together in a way that goes absolutely no where.
2Guns| 1.15.09 @ 3:11PM
Ty,
Guess you learned your lesson concerning book reviews in the NYT.
Alan Brooks| 1.15.09 @ 7:34PM
Jimmuh gets best pikture book award for The Prezident Bilds A Haus
only $29.99
Alan Brooks| 1.15.09 @ 10:12PM
now that O. is (almost) prez it's on sale for $39.99
we believe in progress
RonL | 1.15.09 @ 11:00PM
Sounds like the revisionist garbage peddled by Pat Buchanan these days.
jack| 1.16.09 @ 5:50AM
Just wondering if you read "the Nine" by Toobin?
Liberal revisionist history at its worst. Forced myself to read 300 pages and then threw it away.
JoMend| 1.16.09 @ 12:50PM
Thanks for the recommendation. I think I will buy the book now!
Eight years of an incompetent presidency only to be followed by four more years of the same. Great work Emmett!
God save us from these people.
Alan Brooks| 1.17.09 @ 12:36AM
it's not so much that Bush was incompetent...
the war derailed his presidency. he's human, you know.
we wont have a cyborg for president until quite awhile.
ruth| 1.17.09 @ 2:23PM
I do believe the president was overwhelmed, who wouldn't be? Clinton's fecklessness kicked the Bin Laden can down the road, and dumped 9/11 in Bush's lap. I can just imagine if Gore had been succesful in his attempt to steal the 2000 election. Shudder.
Russell Seitz| 1.17.09 @ 7:08PM
Civilization might yet be saved if , casting off his witless neocoterie , RET were to return to the conspicuous consumption of alcohol and tobacco. The inhuman lack of smoke in the TAS newsroom has clearly taken its toll.
K| 1.25.09 @ 12:08AM
I'm glad this deserving book won the Coogler. But it's time The American Spectator took on Pat Buchana and the similar garbage he is peddling today, before he discredits the rest of intellectual conservatism. He may be and old friend, and I believe wrote well in the past, but enough is enough. His now grotesquely misnamed The American Conservative has even published muck suggesting 9/11 was some kind of Israeli/Jewish plot.
JoMend| 1.27.09 @ 3:17PM
K,
I read The American Conservative but I am not familiar with the article/s you are referring to – that 9/11 was some kind of Israeli/Jewish plot. Do you happen to have the name of the article/s or the date/s of publication? TAC certainly has been critical of Israel and American Support for Israel but I have not read any articles that suggest Jews or Israel had anything to do with the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
As for your comments on Pat Buchanan I would tread lightly. For the remnant that has survived the slaughter of the conservative movement by the neoconservatives and evangelicals, Pat is one of the great ones (along with Taki of course). He has become St. Patrick, speaking the truth no matter the cost, and always with grace and courage. After what the mainstream media and “conservative” media have put him through over the years, there is a sensitivity among the remnant to criticisms of Pat. You can’t blame us though, we have also been through a lot – 8 years of Clinton, 8 years of Bush and now 4 years of Obama. It’s a wonder there is a remnant at all.
Long Live St. Patrick (and Long Live St. Peter)!
Daniel Bennett| 4.13.09 @ 3:06PM
Did you actually read the book? Your quote about how Baker got the title is not from the book I read. The actual quote from page 474 of the paperback version was, "General Halder told an interrogator that when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp late in the war he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell. Human smoke, he called it." What page did you find your quote from if any? And Baker unlike you had the appropriate end note to find the original quote. Also, I read the full article you say shows that Baker takes out of context. Having actually read the full article, I would say you misunderstood both Baker's and Churchill's messages (let your readers decide- http://www.scribd.com/doc/200538/1920-Churchill-Zionism-versus-Bolshevism-on-Illuminati-OCR-by-MatRoX ).
I am saddened you seem to be so offended by pacifism. Perhaps that clouded your ability to understand the book which I do not believe you do based on your angry denunciation of a fully sourced document. In that you appear to have a review of a book about pacifists and pacifism in World War II, a book dedicated to actual pacifists, and you did not mention this at all in your review, I think I am making a fair and accurate assessment.
I hope your readers take a fresh look at the book (thanks for giving it some press) and read the book for what it is, a hope for peaceful actions and the respect for all life.
Yours respectfully,
Daniel
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