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From Jonathan Schell’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke about the social climate leading up to WWII.
The pacifists were equally clear-eyed about strategic bombing, though they could exert very little direct pressure to halt the practice. They also bore witness to what even today is historically obscure—the impact of the blockade of Europe—and, again, acted as they could to counteract its effects. It is striking—and quite out of keeping with the mythology of the “good war”—to learn that former president Herbert Hoover, by no means a pacifist (though he was a Quaker), lobbied tirelessly to find loopholes in the British blockade in order to feed starving people in Poland and other German-invaded powers. “Is the Allied cause any further advanced today as a consequence of this starvation of children?” he demanded to know in October 1941. “Are Hitler’s armies any less victorious than if these children had been saved?” In 1940, the Quakers were feeding thirty thousand children, many of them in concentration camps, in France. It seems there was something about being against the war, whether that position was right or wrong in the larger scheme of things, that enabled these pacifists to see and foresee the suffering the war would bring more clearly than almost any other observers were able to. Baker’s engrossing, bravely contrarian book is dedicated to Pickett’s memory—and to that of his allies in the American and British pacifist cause.
