Nicholson Baker’s got some nerve
Either that or he is one of the stupidest smart people on the planet. Oliver Kamm calls his new book “a trivial, tendentious, ignorant, and more than moderately disgusting work“. More:
In his new book, Human Smoke (New York: Simon and Schuster), Nicholson Baker gives this account of the views of Mohandas K. Gandhi in November 1938: “Even if the Allies were to go to war against Germany, Gandhi said, their action could bring to the Jews no inner joy or strength. Inner joy came from suffering voluntarily forgone.”
Baker is an accomplished novelist, but remarkably, his account of Gandhi’s views is not fictional. Baker moreover sees nothing wrong in them; and this is more remarkable still. So far as I can work out from my own conversations with an admittedly very limited sample of those who witnessed the Nazis’ racial policies, the number of European Jews who secured inner joy from their experience of ghettos, cattle trains, and gas chambers was zero.
On a related note, Oliver has a post that truly shocked me on the UN’s conspiracy crank. Is the United Nations trying to live up to the most negative stereotypes applied to it these days?
Filed under: Life