Human Smoke

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Orwell on Gandhi may be of interest here:

'Even after he had completely abjured violence he was
honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides.
He did not--indeed, since his whole political life centred round a
struggle for national independence, he could not--take the sterile and
dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the
same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western
pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the
late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to
answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them
exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting
to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist,
an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of
evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that
Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer
is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's GANDHI AND STALIN. According to Mr.
Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit
collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of
Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the
Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly.
One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an
admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are
not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be
lost in some other way. '

See: http://www.george-orwell.org/Reflections_of_Ghandi/0.html

Orwell obviously disagrees with Gandhi, even though he respects his 
forthrightness, but certainly would not subscribe to what Heiner 
Geißler, secretary general of the Christian Democratic Party notoriously 
stated in a 1983 debate in the German Bundestag, namely that it was the 
pacifism of the 30s which first made Ausschwitz possible.

My two euro cents.

Thomas


Am 25.03.2013 20:45, schrieb rich:
> far be for me to question those who seek to understand and critique 
> the doings of those in power, including the powers that be in one's 
> own country but striving to say that Hitler could have been stopped 
> without violence well I think that's just horribly naive.
>
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Dave Monroe 
> <against.the.dave at gmail.com <mailto:against.the.dave at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 6:51 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>     <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>     >
>     > "--- Hitler, Roosevelt" (Vineland, p. 372)
>     >
>     > Halfway through with Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke (the German
>     edition from
>     > the library), I want to ask whether you people here have read it
>     and what
>     > you think about it. Could imagine that Michael Bailey loves it,
>     could
>     > imagine that Rich Romeo hates it. Anyone? Offlist is ok with me, too
>
>     Well worth reading.
>
>

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