Hitch reviews Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker’s book on how World War II was wrong and avoidable:
Follow Baker’s logic just a little further, and it becomes possible to imply that the war might actually have helped facilitate the Holocaust. This in turn would help make all participants in the Second World War into morally equivalent forces. And that in fact is Baker’s view, as is the view, not just that all wars are essentially the same, but that they are also all essentially part of the same war. What we call the Second World War was only an extension of the long struggle for mastery between the various European powers, all of which were all the time also wreaking indiscriminate cruelty on colonial peoples. That there is some truth to all this is what gives pacifism its enduring appeal.
The Dish 