Was Sir Winston Churchill an oafish, bloodthirsty, sadistic, hypocritical, anti-Semitic alcoholic? The American novelist Nicholson Baker—whose previous works have been about phone sex and masturbation—certainly seems to think so, for Human Smoke is intended as nonfiction.1
The book has been lauded by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibin in a New York Times review—“riveting and fascinating”—and even the normally sane Simon Winchester has described it as “a quite extraordinary book—impossible to put down, impossible to forget.” Yet once one works out the sly techniques by which the author tries to persuade the reader that Churchill was a foul warmonger, the book is anything but. It uses the technique of juxtaposing bald quotations, ripped out of context, to try to place Churchill on the same moral plane as Adolf Hitler.
The first trick is one of which Dr. Goebbels himself would have been proud: the Big Lie. By quoting a couple of sentences from an article Churchill wrote in The Illustrated Sunday Heraldon February 8, 1920 about Jews being involved in a “sinister” and “worldwide conspiracy,” Baker implies that Churchill was an anti-Semite. Yet if one goes back to the original article itself, it is immediately clear that Churchill was only referring to those Russian Jews who had embraced Bolshevism, which was indeed both a sinister and a worldwide conspiracy at that time. “We owe to the Jews,” he wrote in that same article (but not quoted by Baker), “a system of ethics which, even if it
