Human smoke
A study of the decades leading up to World War II profiles the world leaders, politicians, business people, and others whose personal politics and ideologies provided an inevitable barrier to the peace process and whose actions led to the outbreak of war.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
16mentions
12people
2009–2025years
81% recommend6% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Related to the supposed inevitability of war AND nazi Germany, I recommend Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It’s a good catalog of the choices, both economic and philosophical, on all sides, leading up to it (and contrasted with pacifists).
- What this article misses is that the US "private planes" were being sold directly to Japan and then being converted into military aircraft. What we didn't sell we licensed the designs directly to them.
This went on well into the late 1930s. It was recognized as a potential problem by some but the profits were large enough that these were ignored.
I encourage everyone to read the book "Human Smoke." It is a collection of headlines and newspaper excerpts from the period surrounding WW2. It's a fascinating read and wonderfully exposes all the propaganda driven half truths and complete fabrications we've sold ourselves about the conflict ever since it ended.
- I suspect you’re right.
The Mezzanine and Human Smoke were two of my most impactful reading experiences. Mutually, totally orthogonal and yet both speak to the unbelievable cardinality of complexity in real life
- I highly recommend Human Smoke by Nicholas Baker (2008) for a book that puts WWII in a historical perspective different from the one we inherited.
- In a similar vein, I recommend the 2008 book Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker. He summarizes news reports and other real-time accounts from the years leading up to World War II and the Holocaust. An excerpt, from page 34:
“The New York Times reported, on page one, that the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, a group with sixty thousand members, had issued a statement saying that the reports of atrocities by Nazis against Jews were ‘pure invention.’ It was March 25, 1933.
“Anti-Semitism existed, and it was, the society said, a matter of grave concern, but it was a domestic affair. ‘Let us take an energetic stand against everybody attempting criminally to influence the shaping of Germany’s future through foreign newspapers.’ ”
- Well, isn't it convenient that most of the information coming out of Germany isn't useful because the bad man had his hands on it? I'm sure in the future historians will also disregard most of the information coming out of Trump supporters as part of the misinformation campaign, conspiracy theories, etc, and only the official narrative will be regarded as valid, because that's how history goes.
Since you recommended me a book, I recommend you this book in return https://www.amazon.com/Human-Smoke-Beginnings-World-Civiliza...
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